the making of Nine Lives, Tyler declared: "He's got it somewhere stuck between Toys in the Attic and Rocks." The new sessions began in September 1996, and continued to November. Following the shift in production, Kramer recovered from his depression, and returned to the studio. Instead of playing his tracks over Ferrone's, the band rerecorded from scratch on all of the completed tracks with Kramer. John Kalodner, Columbia's A&R executive was brought back to supervise the project, after he had been pushed off the production in Florida by Collins. He helped trim the twenty-four songs that had been written to thirteen. Initially, the band called the album "Vindaloo" after adding in elements of Indian music throughout some of the songs, including a sarangi intro by Ramesh Mishra on the song, "Taste of India". But upon completing the track "Nine Lives", the band felt that would make the perfect title, serving as a metaphor for the album's troubled conception. Artwork The booklet for Nine Lives contains 12 pieces of album art (including the cover). Each picture contains a smaller version of the previous picture within itself. The final picture is included in the first, creating an infinite loop. It was designed by Stefan Sagmeister. The original cover art, inspired by a painting in a book by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, features Lord Krishna (with a cat's head and female breasts) dancing on the head of the snake demon, Kāliyā. The Hindu community protested, feeling the artwork was offensive. The band had been unaware of the source of the artwork, and the record company apologized, leading to the next prints removing the art from the cover and booklet. The new cover features a cat tied to a circus knife-thrower’s wheel. Reception In his AllMusic review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine compared Nine Lives to previous Aerosmith albums stating, “Nine Lives, in contrast, is overlabored, with Aerosmith making a conscious effort to sound hip and vibrant, which ironically simply makes them sound tired." He also criticized the album's troubled production saying, "Not only are the performances perfunctory, but the songs aren't catchy -- no matter how hard it tries, 'Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)' never develops a hook, and it is not an exception". Elysa Gardner from Rolling Stone was more favorable in her 1997 review concluding, "For those who simply can't abide a collection of Aerosmith tunes without its share