Wolfgang Van Halen has reflected on the time he and his late father Eddie Van Halen jammed on a song that would appear years later on his band Mammoth’s latest album, The End.
Guitar legend Eddie Van Halen tragically passed away in 2020 before the release of any music under his son Wolfgang’s band, Mammoth. The band’s first song, Distance, arrived a month after Eddie’s death, and served as a touching tribute from Wolfgang to his father.
But ideas that would later become Mammoth songs were in the works years beforehand, and as it turns out, Wolfgang even jammed one song in particular with Eddie way back in 2014.
Answering a fan’s question in a new edition of SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation with Eddie Trunk, Wolfgang remembers [via antiMusic] : “Actually in December of 2014 when I was getting ready to track what would be the beginning of Mammoth – it was January 2015 that we started the original tracks.
“I actually have a video – it’s a really terribly filmed video because it’s right next to my hi-hat on my cell phone, so it’s just all hi-hat, total noise.
“But on a song that actually ended up on The End – Selfish – I have a video of my dad and I jamming on that song in 2014, which is crazy to think that it came out last year. That’s how long that idea has been around.”
Wolfgang explains that the pair jammed the song through “a couple of times”.
“I taught him how to play it on guitar, and I got on drums… That’s a video I hold very close. I love that.”
He says the only reason he’s never shared the video with the world is because of the poor audio quality due to the camera placement.
“I don’t know, you can barely hear it,” he says. “I probably should have put the phone camera somewhere else. But yeah, we did. I don’t think it ever got out how stoked Dad was about it. He loved the music so much. And he heard a lot of what would end up on the next few albums, because the 28 songs I wrote at the very beginning of Mammoth in 2015, kind of got spread out because certain ideas weren’t done yet.”
While Wolfgang appears to be in a good spot now, he admits he still has moments of sadness when thinking about sharing his newest musical ideas with his father.
“It’s a tough, emotional thing,” he continues. “Every positive thing that happens to me has a tinge of sadness because it’s like, ‘Dang, I really wish I could have shared this with Dad. I wish he could have seen it. He would be stoked.’”
Sam is the Associate News Editor for Guitar.com and MusicTech. Thoroughly immersed in music culture for the majority of his life, Sam has played guitar for 20 years, studied music technology and production at university, and also written for the likes of Guitar World, Total Guitar, Metal Hammer and MusicRadar.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source guitar.com ’
