"Train Kept A Rollin'" & "Seasons of Wither"

I don't think I need to say anything about this one. There's a reason why it was the grand finale track of Aerosmith's Guitar Hero game. That guitar just chugs on for several minutes, helping convey the story of meeting an anonymous stranger on the train and seducing her. And then at 2:10, the song seems to come to a half, then ramps back up and quickly ups itself to a blistering tempo. On an album, as I said, defined by songs about sex and violence, here you get one of the most violently-sexual tracks in the entire career. It's also faked as a live performance, because I think they had to get expected limitations of studio work out of the way and just go for it. It's the showcase, a demonstration of hard rock greatness.

But somehow this isn't even the song I really want to talk about. It comes to its climax, its conclusion, very nicely and the end with some crowd noise, and then fades into...



Like I said, there is no concert, no cheering fans. They disappear in short order, replaced by a swirling, empty wind. Steven Tyler wrote "Seasons of Wither" about the bleak Massachusetts landscape in winter. Those eerie picked strings circulate like the wind, sending a shiver up your spine until they're finally cut by the lead riff, doing what it can to smooth things over. Here is one of the most ominous songs I've heard.

It's a song of regret, remorse, self-pity ("Love for the devil brought her to me." ... "Ooh woe is me, I feel so badly for you...") climbing into that chorus about "the wind out of your sails," but never quite resolving. I don't know anything about theory, so I'm just talking out my ass, but the way the chorus just leaves off back into the verse seems so unfinished as to be discomforting and sad and beautiful.

This is not a flashy song. Aside from a brief moment of a soaring vocal in the chorus, it's very understated. Even the guitars never seem to reverse course, trudging unsympathetically on a death march in the snow. Any band could do something soft-spoken, or sad, or wistful. Aerosmith did many "slow" songs as the years went on, sometimes sappy sometimes corny, as did many of their contemporaries and cfollowers. Few have the right touch to keep it from becoming just a song, just a so-called "power ballad." This is a feeling. This hangs inside of you. Amidst all the escapist fantasy, the fucking on trains and life on other planets, there's this weird, creeping dread that won't go away...

It's almost unfair that this song follows that one.