Love Is Your Name

Album: We're All Just Somebody From Somewhere (2015)
Charted: 75
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Songfacts®:

  • The first single from Steven Tyler's debut solo album, this was produced by Dann Huff and recorded in Nashville at Blackbird studios. It was released by Dot Records underneath the Big Machine Label Group umbrella (Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw).
  • Tyler's attraction to country music has been evident since 2006, when he collaborated with Keith Anderson on "Three Chord Country and American Rock & Roll."

    "There was an immediate connection with Scott and Big Machine, and Nashville seems like the perfect segue for a solo project and Dot Records is the right fit," he said. "My earliest influences put me somewhere between the Everly Brothers and the Carter Family, and this project is all about me paying homage to my country roots."
  • Tyler moved to Music City in January 2015 where he started hanging out and collaborating with some of Nashville's finest singers and songwriters. "I picked up and headed for Tennessee," he said, "and the first day in the studio, I recorded a song that became my first single, and if 'Love Is Your Name', then Nashville's my new girlfriend. I guess you could call that beginner's luck."
  • Tyler premiered the song on the season finale of American Idol - a move that was reminiscent of the way he shared his previous solo single, "(It) Feels So Good," which also debuted on the show.
  • This may have been Steven Tyler's first solo country hit, but Aerosmith's music has previously made an impact in the genre. In 1995, Garth Brooks took his version of the band's 1993 track "Fever" to #23 on the country chart. Four years later Mark Chesnutt's cover of "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing" led the country tally for two weeks.
  • The song was penned by singer-songwriter Eric Paslay and Nashville newcomer Lindsey Lee. It was the first-ever collaboration between the pair. "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 recalled to 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."

    "He started playing the guitar, and I started singing this melody, and the words just kind of fell into our laps," Lee added. "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."
  • The track wasn't written with Steven Tyler in mind. "To me, it encompasses his style, and I don't think me and Eric knew that when we wrote it," Lee observed. "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 song was Lindsay Lee's big break. It came about in 2013 when Steven Tyler came to Nashville's Bluebird Cafe one night while Lee was playing a songwriters round with longtime Aerosmith songwriter Marti Frederiksen. She recalled to Taste of Country: "He was just there because Marti wanted him to come up and play a couple of songs, because Steven had never played anything like that. He had never played a small club like that, and Marti just kinda wanted him to get a feel of Nashville and the Bluebird. So Steven came, and that's the night that I played 'Love Is Your Name.' I played it in my set."

    Lee continued: "Steven came up to me, and he was crying, and he said, 'Lindsey, you will never know how much your music touched me.' He told me how much he loved 'Love Is Your Name' and that he wanted to record it. This was back in September 2013. At the time he didn't have the record deal yet with Big Machine. He was just in the very beginning stages of thinking he wanted to do a solo record, and I guess the beginning stages of thinking he wanted to do country."

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