Blacktop Mojo Covers Aerosmith’s “Dream On”

Southern hard rock outfit, Blacktop Mojo, has tackled an Aerosmith cover, which is probably one of the most difficult bands to cover, if for nothing else than for Steven Tyler’s unique vocals. But Blacktop Mojo does an exceedingly good job with the classic “Dream On.” The cover is pretty much a straight cover without much reinterpretation, although the heavier parts are brought up to speed with a modern sound and crunch.

Although the effort is there, I feel like the emotion that Tyler injects into the track is lacking from Blacktop Mojo, and they can hardly be faulted for that since it’s not their song. In the same breath, however, if you’re going to cover a song, there should be some sort of connection to it that brings out something intangible in your performance.

Blacktop Mojo’s cover was produced by Philip Mosley and mixed by Austin Deptula at Rosewood Studios, and comes from the band’s upcoming sophomore album, Burn the Ships, which is set to release in early 2017.

Nathan Gillis of Blacktop Mojo commented on the track:
A close friend of ours suggested we do it, and was adamant that he knew it would turn out great… We asked our producer what he thought and he basically said, ‘Well it wouldn’t hurt to try it out.’ After that we learned it, went to the studio and put it down. Listening back we were pretty surprised that it even came out decent… We showed it to a small group of friends and they all said they got chill bumps. At that point we were comfortable enough that we at least hadn’t shamed the song or Aerosmith (who we have a ton of respect for, obviously), so still with a little hesitation we released it. Since then, we’ve been shocked and overwhelmed by the awesome response.

Rock Hard \m/