Alex Van Halen recently made an appearance on Fozzy frontman Chris Jericho’s “Talk Is Jericho” podcast and spoke about the possibility of unreleased Eddie Van Halen music eventually seeing the light of day. Alex said that the plan is to sift through the material carefully to see what’s worthy of release and what isn’t.
Alex said: “I’ve talked about it loosely, and I am rather superstitious, but I can say a couple of things that I’ve mentioned before. We’re gonna go through the, quote-unquote, vault and go through some of the musical ideas that were there. On the one end of the spectrum is the fact that little licks don’t make a song. On the other end of the spectrum, some of those licks are so unbelievably powerful, it’s too bad that they ended up in the back of the vault, rather than being records.”
“There are so many different variables in a band like ours,” Alex explained. “We don’t just walk in the studio and plan, ‘Let’s make a record,’ although we have done that to some degree. But it’s not a mechanical process for us. We go in and we play and see what happens, listen to it, invite a couple of people and then see what happens with that. And then you listen and you evaluate. If the next day, when you come in and listen to it, if it doesn’t kick you in the face like it did the first time, then maybe you should move on and do something else. Don’t hold on to an old idea just because it’s there. No. That’s not how we did it. Having said that, there were also a lot of bad ideas. [Laughs] That’s always the risk you run, but if you don’t do that, you will become — it’ll become inert. It’s called inertia, or whatever — entropy. Things will fall off and then you become less and less creative. And the other aspect of all of that is that you are in an open marketplace where you are being judged, and if you don’t do well in the marketplace, people are gonna go, ‘Maybe it’s time to do something else.’ And that is a real issue. But now that Ed’s gone, none of those things are really valid because all I have, and Wolf has, is all the recordings in the vault. And they will stay there until we figure out how and why and what to do with them. And again, you have to remember, it has to be on the level of where Ed and I, where we used to play. We’re not just gonna shovel it in. We have access to some of the greatest musicians on the planet, and a lot of ’em are more than willing to take a chance on some of the stuff.”
Jericho said that it sounds like Alex has more than just one or two demos that he could elaborate on and release to the public and the drummer said:
“Oh, yeah. Probably three or four records, if not more. I’m serious. There was some good stuff, some good stuff in there. And you have to remember, when in the thick of it, sometimes the really great stuff kind of passes you by. And it’s not until you revisit it going, ‘Whoa, I forgot about that. This kicks ass.’ But that takes time. And you wanna do it right. I wanna do it right.”
He further spoke about the fact that the audiobook version of his new memoir “Brothers” contains a previously unreleased song composed by Alex and his brother. It is titled “Unfinished” and it is the last piece of music they wrote together which can be heard as Alex narrates his story.
“I don’t wanna use the word ‘spiritual’, but there is a connection with… Ed and I were very much a product of how our dad saw the world, and one of his favorite pieces of music was a song called ‘Unfinished’ by Franz Schubert,” Alex said.
“Actually, it wasn’t until I’d done this that I went back and looked at it. It turns out he had a lot of pieces that were unfinished. That seemed to be one of his major traits. So we had this song that was not completely finished yet. It was one of my most memorable songs that was constantly playing in the house. So I thought it was kind of a sign from some different dimension: ‘do this’. And as you can tell, I go off on a tangent that may or may not even be real, but I believe that stuff, man. There are a lot of things in this world that we do not know. There’s no explanation for them. All you have to do is just sit down, slow down and listen, which is easier said than done.”
Also in October, the drummer noted to Billboard that the unreleased Van Halen music may not be everyone’s cup of tea. He said:
“I know people want to hear it. the other side of the coin is this doesn’t sound like Van Halen. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
Eddie passed away in October 2020 at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, California. Alex was by his side, as was Eddie’s son, Wolfgang. He passed away from complications due to cancer as his son had confirmed.
