John J. Moser of The Morning Call recently conducted an interview with Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

The Morning Call: I've been reading about all the delays in recording your next album. What's the story behind that, and how much frustration does it present for you?

Perry: "Only about a million percent. I had to have my knee replaced over a year ago and I was just about healed up and it got infected and that happened around Thanksgiving and into Christmas. I think it was right after Christmas I had to have it operated on. That pushed everything back and we lost a lot of time trying to work out our schedules. And then finally we got some time and we got the ball rolling and we had the songs — we were getting ready to cut the songs and Steven got this bronchitis that turned into pneumonia at the same time was getting an ear infection and they had to pierce one of his eardrums and it was just one of those things. I mean this really bad flu bug that's been going around — not the swine one — but he got a really bad infection, just that bronchitis and he couldn't sing. So that just was one of those things. It was going to take four weeks for it to heal. And we just couldn't do it and still make the tour. And at that point the tour had been booked. We were hopeful we'd have the record out and then tour behind it, but it just wasn't meant to be. But the good side of it for me was I had time – all of a sudden I had this month and a half of time. I have songs — whenever I write I just write a lot and I had a bunch of stuff for a solo record that actually I wasn't planning on putting out for a while, but I said, ‘Wow, I got all this time, I got these songs. So I called up some friends and we started playing, and after about a month of around-the-clock work, through the weekends, we got finished the record. So I have a solo record coming out at the end of the summer."

The Morning Call: You think when this tour's done, you'll tour with that record?

Perry: "I'd like to, even if it's a short go-around to major markets at least and do that. I was so close to doing it on the last project but we were … I mean, I was getting offers from all over the world to play and it was the hardest thing to turn down 'cause I had like a month and a half before I was going to have to start touring with Aerosmith, and I just didn't want to step right off a Joe Perry tour right into an Aerosmith tour. I would have been fried at the beginning of a tour and that's a formula for a really big screw-up. So I couldn't do any more live gigs, but I would really like to do it this time."

I was watching Living with Michael Jackson again last night and Martin Bashir asked him how does he write a song. He said for Billie Jean he just wanted to come up with a good bassline. It wasn't coming to him in the studio so he left and as he was driving the road helped him come up with that distinctive bassline. Martin asked where did it come from and Jackson shrugged his shoulders and said God.

What this anecdotal story represents is what all creative persons experience. If you try to force something, it rarely happens. If I sat down here and tried to write something for the website, I would get nothing. I would watch porn or check email rather than writing what I should be. Same thing goes for writing songs. If you sit down with a pad and pen, creative rarely flows.

Injuries aside, this has to be what Aerosmith is dealing with. No member is in the same room at the same time which makes it hard to write a song. Then they have this compulsory need to tour every summer or fall. A year without Aerosmith on the road might make people clamor for them and ask where is another Aerosmith record?