Aerosmith's Joe Perry turns to fans for album title

By Gary Graff

DETROIT (Billboard) - Aerosmith's next album might be "on the bench, in pieces," waiting for the group to resume recording after it finishes touring in mid-September, but guitarist Joe Perry's next solo album is just about ready to go.

Perry tells Billboard.com that he's finishing mixing the follow-up to 2005's Grammy-nominated "Joe Perry." He plans to release a single in late July or early August, and the album will come out in the fall.

The one thing Perry doesn't have yet is a title; for that he's holding a contest via Twitter, asking fans for suggestions. If he chooses a fan's idea, the winner will receive a guitar.

"It's tough, obviously, without having heard the record for people to name it," he notes, "but we may find something really good. There've already been a bunch that are possibilities."

Perry says the set is a departure from his previous solo outing. "The last one was a straight-ahead rocker. This one's got some different things on it."

The album was recorded in about seven weeks at Perry's home studio, The Boneyard; he shares lead vocal duties with a German singer who his wife, Billie, discovered on the Internet, and there's one instrumental track. David Hull from the Joe Perry Project and Ben Tileston, who plays with two of Perry's sons in TAB The Band, were also involved.

"We were working around the clock, through weekends and everything, and it was all live," Perry says. "In fact, a lot of the vocals are live along with the rest of the band. (Sound) was bleeding from one track to another; if somebody had a bad take everybody had a bad take, and we played it 'til we got a good one. Of course we went in and overdubbed a lot of the other stuff, but the energy is there. You can feel it."

Once the album is released, Perry hopes to hit the road with his own band for "a short, fast, hard tour. That's what I'm really looking forward to ... getting back out there with some old friends and some other musicians and doing it like the old days."