Thanks for the responses guys, so basically it comes down to this: When I try to import the ae project into premiere the sequence gets imported with a little green and yellow “X” box in the project pane, and won’t let me drag into timeline. It’s really weird and it only happens with certain AE sequences. Very weird.
The only reason why I’m going this route to add music is because it requires a lot of cutting and AE is a nightmare to cut a sound track to a video, BUT the solution I found was to just save my AE project as a PP, open it up in PP (with all of the masks gone etc) and just cut the sound track for the whole video, export just the audio, bring it into AE and voilà : audio file that matches up perfectly to my AE intensive project, then I just render the movie from there. 🙂