Lyrics Uncovered: Steven Tyler, ‘Love Is Your Name’
Though he's best-known as a legendary rocker, Steven Tyler's "Love Is Your Name" lyrics are returning country music to its roots.
The Aerosmith frontman is getting set to release his first-ever country album, and he chose "Love Is Your Name" as the lead single to test the waters. The song came about more or less by chance, the result of a first-time collaboration between Eric Paslay and Lindsey Lee, a relatively new writer in Nashville's music scene.
"We were in this little tiny room at his publishing company, and I usually go into writes with titles or ideas and concepts and stuff, and that day I come in, and I said, 'Well, do you want me to throw out some title ideas?" Lee tells Taste of Country. "And Eric was like, 'You know, Lindsey, let's just see what falls from the sky.' And I never will forget him saying that, because that's not usually how I roll. But we got the most amazing song I've ever written out of that, because he said that."
The work process for the song was very fast. "He started playing the guitar, and I started singing this melody, and the words just kind of fell into our laps," Lee recalls. "We started saying the most poetic things, and it kinda just fell out of us. It was crazy. It was almost like it was meant to be written through us or something. It was really cool for me, because like I said, I usually start with an idea, but Eric was just like, 'Nope, let's just see what flows out of us.' And that's what flowed out of us that day."
It was almost like it was meant to be written through us or something.
The "Love Is Your Name" lyrics make strong use of imagery for a twist on a classic country love song: "I'll walk through the fire / I'll run through the rain / I’ll wait for forever / If love is your name."
The song is a perfect fit for Tyler's voice, but it wasn't written with him in mind. "To me, it encompasses his style, and I don't think me and Eric knew that when we wrote it," Lee observes. "We were just writing a song. We didn't say, 'Hey, let's write this for so-and-so.' We just wrote what flowed out of us, and it ended up being exactly what Steven Tyler saw himself doing after Aerosmith, which is weird."
The "Love Is Your Name" lyrics and sprightly acoustic guitar figure stand out from anything else that's at country radio at the moment. "This song, we weren't specifically aiming for a certain genre, so maybe that's why it doesn't sound like anything that's on country radio, because we weren't aiming for country radio when we wrote it," Lee says. "But I think it has that country, rootsy feel, and the lyrics are true and genuine and heartfelt. And to me, that's what country music is, not the bro-country that's flooding our radios right now. It's different. To me it's true country, because it's from the heart."
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