Dream On

Steven Tyler wrote the music for "Dream On" on a Steinway upright piano in the living room of Trow-Rico Lodge in Sunapee, perhaps four years before Aerosmith even started. He was seventeen or eighteen at the time, playing what he called just a little thing, and he never dreamed it would end up as a real song. The lyrics were completed when he was only fourteen. Tyler later traced the song's chords back to early childhood, recalling how he would lie beneath the piano as a three-year-old while his father, a Juilliard-trained musician, played classical music. That, he said, was where he got the "Dream On chordage", and the song is about holding onto a dream until it comes true.

The track closed out Aerosmith's 1973 debut album and was released as a single that June. It stalled at number 59 on the Billboard Hot 100, though Boston embraced it, making it the number one single of the year on WBZ-FM. When the full album version was re-issued in late 1975, the song broke into the top 40 in February 1976 and peaked at number 6 that April, the band's first top 10 effort. Columbia Records serviced top 40 stations with both long and short versions, the 45 edit cutting most of the intro and replacing the first chorus with the second, so many pop radio listeners heard the trimmed take.