Nine Lives is the twelfth studio album by American rock band Aerosmith, released on March 18, 1997. The album was produced by Aerosmith and Kevin Shirley, and was the band's first studio album released by Columbia Records since 1982's Rock in a Hard Place. In the United States, it peaked at number one on the Billboard 200 and sold over two million copies. One of the album's singles, "Pink", won a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. Until Music from Another Dimension!, Nine Lives was their longest album, at 63 minutes.
Production
Early recordings took place at Criteria Studios in Miami, Florida, where the band worked with producer Glen Ballard. There, Steven Tyler and Ballard co-wrote the lyrics for "Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)", "Taste of India" and "Pink". Other collaborators, including Desmond Child and Taylor Rhodes, joined Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry to write songs. Child previously collaborated with Aerosmith on such hits as "Angel". "Crazy" and "Dude (Looks like a Lady)".
Only a week before rehearsals, drummer Joey Kramer was suffering from depression, having grieved the loss of his father a few years prior. With Kramer unavailable, rumors began to circulate that the band would disband. Steve Ferrone was brought in to play drums until Kramer was able to return. "I came back with a nice perspective on what I bring to the table in Aerosmith," Kramer reflected. "That was healthy for me. We ended up rerecording because people were listening to the tracks and were saying some negative stuff about it and saying the band didn't sound the same."
Originally set for a summer release in 1996, the album was delayed, because Columbia Records felt dissatisfied with the nine tracks that Aerosmith and Ballard had produced. Further issues occurred in July that year, when the band asked their manager Tim Collins to step down after almost twelve years of partnership. In his 2014 autobiography Rocks: My Life In and Out of Aerosmith, Perry recounted that Aerosmith felt betrayed by Collins, as he would pit the members against one another. With their longtime manager gone, the band decided to hire in-house producer Kevin Shirley, and set up at Avatar Studios in New York City. Shirley, who had also worked with Journey, helped with the album's overtones and instruments, particularly the guitar sounds. In a 1997 MTV special promoting the making of Nine Lives, Tyler declared: "He's got it somewhere stuck between Toys in the Attic and Rocks."
The new sessions began in September 1996, and continued to November. Following the shift in production, Kramer recovered from his depression, and returned to the studio. Instead of playing his tracks over Ferrone's, the band rerecorded from scratch on all of the completed tracks with Kramer. John Kalodner, Columbia's A&R executive was brought back to supervise the project, after he had been pushed off the production in Florida by Collins. He helped trim the twenty-four songs that had been written to thirteen. Initially, the band called the album "Vindaloo" after adding in elements of Indian music throughout some of the songs, including a sarangi intro by Ramesh Mishra on the song, "Taste of India". But upon completing the track "Nine Lives", the band felt that would make the perfect title, serving as a metaphor for the album's troubled conception.
Artwork
The booklet for Nine Lives contains 12 pieces of album art (including the cover). Each picture contains a smaller version of the previous picture within itself. The final picture is included in the first, creating an infinite loop. It was designed by Stefan Sagmeister.
The original cover art, inspired by a painting in a book by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, features Lord Krishna (with a cat's head and female breasts) dancing on the head of the snake demon, Kāliyā. The Hindu community protested, feeling the artwork was offensive. The band had been unaware of the source of the artwork, and the record company apologized, leading to the next prints removing the art from the cover and booklet. The new cover features a cat tied to a circus knife-thrower's wheel.