"Toys in the Attic" is a song by American hard rock band Aerosmith. Written by Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, it is the first song and title track from the band's third album Toys in the Attic, their bestselling studio album in the United States. The song is three minutes, five seconds long. It was released as the B-side to the "You See Me Crying" single in 1975.

Achievements

The song "Toys in the Attic" is part of the The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll list.

The song was included as a playable track in the video games Rock Band 4 and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith.

Other versions

The song is also featured on two of the band's live albums, Live! Bootleg (1978) and Classics Live II (1987). It is also found as a bonus track on some pressings of the career-spanning collection O, Yeah! Ultimate Aerosmith Hits (2002).

Cover versions

R.E.M. recorded a version of the song in 1986 as a b-side to their single "Fall on Me". This can be found on Dead Letter Office, with guitarist Peter Buck noting that the song "...was always fun to play live."

Toys in the Attic is a euphemism for insanity; it may also refer to:

Toys in the Attic is the third studio album by American rock band Aerosmith, released in April 1975 by Columbia Records. Its first single release, "Sweet Emotion", was released a month later on May 19 and "Walk This Way" was later released on August 28 in the same year. The album is their most commercially successful studio LP in the US, with eight million copies sold, according to the RIAA.

Steven Tyler said that his original idea for the album cover was a teddy bear sitting in the attic with its wrist cut and stuffing spread across the floor. They decided, in the end, to put all of the animals in instead.

The album was ranked #229 on Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. "Walk This Way" and the album's title track are part of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll list.

Background

For Aerosmith's previous album, 1974's Get Your Wings, the band began working with record producer Jack Douglas, who co-produced the album with Ray Colcord. In the liner notes to the 1993 reissue of Greatest Hits it was said by an unnamed member of the group that they "nailed" the album. At the beginning of 1975 the band started working at The Record Plant in New York City for the album that became Toys in the Attic. The sessions for Toys were produced by Douglas without Colcord - the album was engineered by Jay Messina with assistant engineers Rod O'Brien, Corky Stasiak and Dave Thoener. The songs for Toys were recorded with a Spectrasonics mixing board and a 16-track tape recorder. By this point, Aerosmith had fully matured as a band and Steven Tyler made sex the primary focus of his songwriting on the album.

Toys in the Attic is a play by Lillian Hellman.

Plot

Set in New Orleans following the Great Depression, the play focuses on the Berniers sisters, two middle-aged spinsters who have sacrificed their own ambitions to look after their ne'er-do-well younger brother Julian, whose grandiose dreams repeatedly lead to financial disasters. When he unexpectedly returns home accompanied by his emotionally unstable, childlike young bride Lily, her aloof, aristocratic mother Albertine, and an unexplained large sum of money, Carrie and Anna suddenly find that the position of power they have always held has become unbalanced, leaving their lives in chaos.

Background

It took Hellman three years to complete the semi-autobiographical play, which evolved from a plot suggested by her lover Dashiell Hammett, most of which eventually was abandoned. Julian is based on Hellman’s father Max, who was adored by his two sisters and became a successful salesman after his first business failed. Carrie has an incestuous infatuation with her brother, similar to the strong sexual attraction Hellman felt for an uncle when she was an adolescent, and one of her aunts had an affair with an African American chauffeur, as does Albertine in the play.