Wolfgang Van Halen Dives Into Mammoth’s New Album, ‘The End’

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“I didn’t really have any ideas or hopes, I just knew I needed to do something on my own.”

On Thursday (Oct. 2), Wolfgang Van Halen joined Loudwire Nights to discuss everything happening in the world of Mammoth — including his latest album, The End, set for release on Oct. 24.

Listen to the full conversation in the player near the end of this article.

“That was just a personal challenge and just to see if I could and if it was something I could make my life about,” Van Halen explained to host Chuck Armstrong about the early days of Mammoth.

The world first got a taste of Van Halen’s potential solo music when his father, Eddie, brought it up in 2015.

“He mentioned [it during a Smithsonian interview],” he recalled.

“You could tell how stoked he was about it because I had about 20 of those ideas. He heard so much of it. You could tell how proud he was.”

Now a decade later, Van Halen is readying his third Mammoth album, The End, though he admitted he’s always working on new music.

“That’s what I do, I play instruments and stuff, but the thing that I like most is writing songs,” he shared.

“You can’t really pick when a song comes to you or when an idea comes to you. You end up building this bank of random, crappy humming into your phone — hopefully you’ve got the idea out there.”

Van Halen said as he records albums, there are always songs left on the cutting room floor that may find life later.

“The way we do it, we end up getting about 10 or 15 ideas for the record,” he said.

“There’s going to be stuff that falls off the side, not because they weren’t good enough, but because you just didn’t have enough time. You end up sort of building this overflow of a bunch of ideas you’re excited to get back to — and then you get together to do the record and then you end up writing 10 more.”

What Else Did Wolfgang Van Halen Discuss on Loudwire Nights?

What it was like paying tribute to Ozzy Osbourne with his cover of “Mama, I’m Coming Home” the night of the legend’s death: “I was doing everything I could not to cry and mess up. Literally from the second we got the alert that it happened, I was like, ‘We can’t just do nothing. We have to do something.’ It just felt like the right thing. So we sat there for four hours…I don’t have the lyrics memorized, I never knew how to play the solo. We just sat there and did everything we could to be like, ‘Is this good enough? Can we do this?’ And we did it. I’m my own worst critic, so I wish I would have done better, but I was definitely doing everything I could to make sure it was worthy and good.”
Why he’s excited to tour with Myles Kennedy to support The End: “It’s funny to think, this is really only our second headline tour ever. We’ve done a smattering of random headline shows and we had the main headline tour for Mammoth II, but this is only our second that we’ve ever had. So it’s going to be cool. We’ve got a lot of music to pick from now and there’s a lot of new stuff I definitely want to play for everybody.”
His thoughts behind his song, “I Really Wanna“: “I think songwriting within itself for me is a cathartic thing. The idea that I think I’ve just been reckoning with [is] that no matter what I do, somebody somewhere is going to be really fucking angry with me. So I might as well just embrace it and try to have fun with it at the end of the day. It’s just unnecessary — might as well just have fun.”