The impressive amount of unreleased material left by Eddie Van Halen

The latest studio album by Van Halen, A Different Kind of Truthcame out in 2012. In the following years, the band even contemplated the idea of ​​recording an album, but the guitarist Eddie Van Halen began dealing with health problems. In 2020, he passed away, aged 65, from cancer.

Fact is that Eddie and his brother, the drummer Alex Van Halennever stopped creating together. And there is so much material composed by the late guitarist that the volume is frightening.

In an interview with Talk is Jericho (via Blabbermouth), Alex shared more details about the musical collection left by his brother. Initially, he said that he has no concrete plans to release these records, but he is not opposed to the idea — so much so that he made the instrumental available “Unfinished” as a way to promote your memoir, brothers.

Let’s go through the ‘vault’ and some of the musical ideas that were in there. On one side of the spectrum is the fact that short snippets don’t make a song. At the other end of the spectrum, some of these excerpts are so incredibly powerful that it’s a shame they ended up at the bottom of the vault rather than being officially recorded.”

According to Alexthe Van Halen as a band they had a peculiar way of functioning: they didn’t decide to record albums, it just happened. The material was recorded so that, after that, those involved could evaluate whether it would be released or not. However, without Eddiethe scenario changes.

Now that Ed gone, none of those things are really valid because all I have, and Wolf [filho de Eddie e baixista da formação final do Van Halen] Yes, it’s the recordings in the safe. And they will stay there until we figure out how, why and what to do with them. It has to be at the level that Ed and I used to play at.”

Then came the revelation that there is the equivalent of three or four entire albums of music left by the guitarist. The drummer scores:

We probably have three or four records, if not more. I’m serious. There were some good things in there, which kind of pass by until you revisit it and say, ‘wow, I forgot about that, that’s f##k.’ In any case, this takes time. And I want to do it right.”

Van Halen’s final song

Still during the interview, Alex Van Halen commented a little more about “Unfinished”. The song was used in the audiobook version of brothers and made available separately on the internet.

I don’t want to use the word ‘spiritual’, but there is a connection with… Ed and I were very much a product of how our father [o músico Jan Van Halen] saw the world. One of his favorite songs was ‘Unfinished’ of Franz Schubert. We had this song that wasn’t completely finished yet. It was one of my most memorable songs that I played constantly at home. Then I felt a kind of signal from some different dimension: ‘do this’. It may or may not be real, but I believe in this stuff, man. There are many things in this world that we don’t know. All you have to do is sit back, slow down and listen, which is easier said than done. [Risos]”