Tough Love: Best of the Ballads
1. Angel
2. Amazing
3. Love in an Elevator
4. Cryin'
5. What it Takes
6. Rag Doll
7. Crazy
8. Deuces are Wild
9. Livin' on the Edge
10.Blind Man
11.Janie's Got a Gun
12.Dream On
The release of Tough Love: Best of the Ballads marked a particularly dispiriting moment in the history of Aerosmith. The compilation came not from a place of artistic rejuvenation, but rather from internal fractures and commercial necessity. The band, once renowned for their electric camaraderie and unfiltered stagecraft, had long since begun to fray at the seams. Attempts at revival—including murmurings of a new album or tour—were derailed, not least by Steven Tyler's controversial decision to moonlight as a judge on American Idol. For a band once synonymous with rock defiance, this felt more like resignation than reinvention.
So, instead of new material or genuine cohesion, the public received another retrospective—this time themed loosely (and inaccurately) around “ballads.” The result was a carefully packaged but artistically vacant collection, drenched in déjà vu. To be sure, the tracks themselves are largely unimpeachable in isolation, but this only underscores the problem. We've heard it all before. And heard it better—contextualized within albums that breathed with creative urgency.
Curiously, or perhaps tellingly, the compilation excludes several of the band’s most sincere and lesser-known ballads. Their absence is glaring, suggesting not an act of curation, but a gesture of market calculus. It’s difficult to escape the impression that Tough Love was less about celebrating the emotional breadth of Aerosmith's catalogue and more about squeezing one more dollar from a legacy on pause. In the end, Tough Love is neither tough nor loving—it is, rather, a hollow echo of what once was. Not an homage to Aerosmith’s sensitive side, but a coda to a band unsure whether to move forward or cling to fragments of former glory.