Now that’s rock and roll… and a wild way to meet a sibling you didn’t even know you had.
This week, Liv and Mia Tyler, daughters of Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, appeared on an episode of the Sibling Revelry podcast with Kate and Oliver Hudson, where they talked about how they found out they were related while backstage at an Aerosmith concert.
Liv’s mom is Bebe Buell, and Mia’s mother is Cyrinda Foxe, and they had decided to take them to the same show… Mia recalled the fact that they were the only kids there that night, and so they played together the entire evening. While sitting at a VIP area outside of the green rooms, a woman walked up to them and asked if they were sisters:
“I remember there were no kids backstage. So we played hard that night. And we were at this VIP area, outside of the green rooms, and we were just like, you know, doing our 9- and 9-year-old thing, and this fan lady came up and she was like, ‘Oh my god, you girls are so cute. Are you guys sisters?'”
Even crazier is that Liv didn’t even know Steven was her dad, as she had grown up thinking her dad was Utopia frontman Todd Rundgren, who was a father figure to her and even signed her birth certificate… so yeah, what else was she supposed to think? Mia’s mom had already told her about Liv, so she knew, but Liv said in the podcast that she just joked and said “yes” to the woman and pretended they were until she found out later in the night that was true.
She explained:
“That particular night that she’s talking about, Guns N’ Roses were opening for Aerosmith. It was the beginning of their song ‘Welcome to the Jungle.’ We had driven to the gig at a place called Great Woods. We got tickets and we went to the audience and we were standing, and Guns N’ Roses was playing and I was so excited because I just loved Guns N’ Roses.
And on the side of the stage was this one girl standing there. Axl used to dedicate ‘Sweet Child o Mine’ to me like every tour, and he’d bring me out on stage and be like, ‘This is again to you.'”
It was in that moment that Liv realized there actually might be more than a friendship than the girl she was playing with that night, who looked exactly like her and was dressed nearly the same way:
“I just remember standing there watching them play, looking and seeing this girl who looked exactly like me. Like, we literally had the same outfit on. We had both had perms, like spiral perms, pink frosty lipstick. We were both wearing an Aerosmith concert T-shirt with black leggings and Reebok high-top sneakers. I looked and I was like, ‘Wait, that’s me.’ It was really weird. I was literally like looking in the mirror, seeing double.”
Her mom, Bebe, decided to tell her that Steven was actually her dad after everything they experienced at the concert, and Liv says she burst into tears learning that her father wasn’t at all who she thought he was. Shocking news for anyone, but especially a young girl who is not only finding out about her dad, but also her sister, who she never knew existed:
“I looked at my mom, and she just started crying. My mom was bawling, and I was like, ‘Is Steven my dad?’ and she just burst. She took me to a bench and we sat on at an outdoor amphitheater, and she told me the whole story in the most sincere, beautiful way.”
From then on, Liv and Mia got very close, and Liv got to have a relationship with her real father, though she knows it must’ve been hard for Rundgren, who she still loves very much (it’s unclear if he knew the full situation at the time too). It’s the kind of story that you would honestly expect from a rocker like Steven Tyler, and while it could’ve gone very differently in terms of the girls even liking each other and carrying on a close sister relationship, but they seem to be very close still and speak highly of their father.
You can watch part of the clip below, and the full podcast is audio only available wherever you listen to podcasts:
