Joe Perry Contributes to Billy Ray Cyrus Album and SpongeBob SquarePants Musical
Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry has been busy. In addition to touring Europe with his band, as well as writing and recording songs for what may become its next album, he's also contributed to Billy Ray Cyrus' upcoming record and the new SpongeBob SquarePants musical.
Cyrus's new album, Set the Record Straight, is due Nov. 10, and includes several collaborators in addition to Perry, including his daughter Miley Cyrus, Loretta Lynn, Bryan Adams and Glenn Hughes. Perry contributed to the record's opening track, "Tulsa Time," which you can listen to above.
At least some of the guests seem to realize that's a strange mix. “They’ll probably go, ‘Glenn and Bryan Adams and Billy Ray Cyrus ... That’s crazy,’ Hughes, who sang with both Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, said earlier this year. “Just remember this: I’m a little crazy, and I like to do things that make people think, ‘What is he doing now?’ And I like to shock people. I’m not someone who likes to live a normal kind of life.”
Perry, meanwhile, along with Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler, joins other rock and pop artists for the upcoming SpongeBob SquarePants stage production. The show -- which opens Nov. 6 at the Palace Theater in New York -- including songs penned by the Flaming Lips, Cyndi Lauper and David Bowie, among others. Bowie memorably lent his voice to a special expanded episode of the animated TV show in 2007.
As previously reported, Aerosmth have also started work on a new track, putting off a U.S. tour to spend time in the studio. “This song is a musical idea of Joe Perry's,” guitarist Brad Whitford said. “We’re doing it very much like we did songs back when we started out. It’s very rock ‘n' roll.”
Perry said the band still has an album or two left in them, but Whitford noted that "you don’t have to record a whole CD anymore. So, hopefully, we can put out this one song or two or three. ... The music business has changed so much since we started. You have to do things really differently, We could just release one song and make it available for download.”
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