Creativity Quote by Steven Tyler

Steven Tyler’s line lands like a half-laugh, half-shrug from someone who’s watched rock culture try and fail to predict its own future for five decades. “Nothing is ever a barometer” rejects the critic’s favorite fantasy: that any album, trend, scandal, or comeback can cleanly measure where music is headed. In Tyler’s mouth, it’s also a swipe at the media logic that treats every Aerosmith tour as evidence of either “rock’s revival” or “rock’s death rattle.” The point is that the thermometer keeps changing, and the patient refuses to die on schedule.

The repetition in “Nothing is ever…” is doing the work of a drumbeat: blunt, rhythmic, slightly weary. Then he pivots to the lone certainty: “except that this band has been around forever.” It’s brag and disbelief at once. “Forever” is obviously impossible, which is why it’s funny; it’s also emotionally accurate in the way legends become weather systems. Aerosmith stops being a band you discovered and becomes a band you inherit, like classic cars or holiday songs.

Context matters here: Tyler has spent years navigating reinvention, addiction recovery, lawsuits, lineup stability, and the Vegas-era transformation of rock into a durable live product. The subtext is survival as identity. Not relevance, not purity, not prophecy. Just the stubborn, absurd fact of still being here, long after the barometers broke.