Alex Van Halen recently spoke to Rolling Stone and said that he has a singer in mind for unreleased Van Halen material.
Alex Van Halen opens up on the matter
There are a lot of unreleased music in the Van Halen vaults. However, very few finished songs, and even fewer with vocals.
“They’re all little pieces,” he says. “A bunch of licks don’t make a song.”
That said, there is a group of songs that Alex would like to find a way to release, though he warns it could take years. He’s reached out to OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, about the possibility of analyzing “the patterns of how Edward would have played something” so that they could help generate new guitar solos.
And he has a singer in mind for this material. “Ideally, it’d be Robert Plant,” he says, though he hasn’t talked to the former Led Zeppelin frontman since 1993. “You’re gonna think I’m out of my f**ing mind,” Alex adds.
“But when conditions are right, things will manifest.”
It has come to light that the other project Alex is working on, slowly, is a Van Halen biopic, for which he’s currently seeking a producer. “It’s just a long-term plan,” he says.
“I mean, to put things in perspective, the Queen movie took 30 years to make.”
Meanwhile, Alex hasn’t been able to play drums for the past couple of years due to his spinal injury, but lately, he’s been able to hit practice pads again. More importantly, he can walk, with a slight lurching limp, which is more than he could manage for a while.
All those multiplatinum records and sold-out arenas have left him with considerable resources. His brother’s cancer battle connected him with doctors pursuing bleeding-edge treatments. He sought out an experimental stem-cell therapy from one of them, with miraculous results.