Photo: Archive Photos
When Sammy Hagar left Van Halen, it was no secret that things ended on bad terms; however, Eddie Van Halen and Hagar mended their years-long feud prior to the guitarist's death in 2020. The two had plans to write music together that never came to fruition, and in a new interview The Red Rocker lamented that "the best stuff was yet to come."
“Eddie and I wrote some great songs together, and I think the best stuff was yet to come… because Eddie was really reaching out on instruments,” Hagar explained. “Last time I talked to Eddie before he passed I said, ‘Man, what are you playing?’ He said, ‘Oh, man, I’ve really been playing a lot of cello!’ And I’m going, ‘Cello? Holy s**t! Play me something, dude. I’m ready to write a song with you on cello!’”
“As artists, Eddie and I were really capable of doing a lot of stuff that he couldn’t do before me, because the other guy didn’t want keyboards," Hagar pointed out, taking a dig at his Van Halen predecessor David Lee Roth. "And when I [first] walked in the room with Eddie … he showed me ‘Good Enough’ and he showed me ‘Summer Nights.’ Those are two riffs he had. And then what did he do? He went and sat down at the piano and he started playing all this stuff. And I'm going, ‘Whoa. What?’ He starts playing the riff to ‘Dreams;’ he’s sitting there playing ‘Love Walks In.’
“I’m going, ‘Whoa, I had no idea he was that good of a keyboard player.’ So he really wanted to expand as a musician. … And it was always held back by the record companies and the people around him. I think we would’ve broken out of that… and start doing some really crazy stuff.”
Although they were never able to write that song on cello, Hagar did recently release a new song called "Encore, Thank You, Goodnight" that he says EVH helped him write in a dream. "Most people don't want to hear about your dreams, and so I was hesitant to bring this up, you know?" Hagar said when the song came out. "I thought, 'Maybe I'll just write this song and just never say nothing about it.' But I can't not talk about this. This was way too out there. We actually were writing a freaking song over in the corner, like we do, like Eddie does."