Sammy Hagar is sensationally claiming that his new song was written with Eddie Van Halen — a year after the legendary guitarist’s death.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, ex-Van Halen singer Hagar says that this song — titled Encore, Thank You, Goodnight — is the product of a dream he had in 2020, in which he was reunited with Eddie.
“He had a guitar around his neck,” Hagar says, “and we were having a love fest since we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. And he just started playing this riff, and I started singing.”
Hagar says he woke from that dream with the music in his head.
“I just grabbed a pad and a pencil,” he recalls.”And I got my iPhone. My wife’s screaming, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Writing a song!’
“It just kept coming and coming. When I got up the next day, I grabbed my guitar and started to figure out the chords.”
Hagar insists: “This was one hundred percent a communication from the beyond. There is no question about it.”
He adds: “I dream about Eddie all the time, quite honestly.”
Hagar says he finished writing the song earlier this year, and then decided to record it with the musicians featured in his current touring band — guitarist Joe Satriani, former Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony and drummer Kenny Aronoff.
He says that Satriani’s encouragement was key.
“I thought, ‘I’ll never write a song with Eddie again. This is the closest I can come to it.’ When I told Joe about the dream and played him the thing he went, ‘Oh man. Hell yeah. Let’s finish that. That’s a cool song.’”
Satriani has been performing classic Van Halen material with Hagar on tour.
“Joe’s a scholar,” Hagar says. “He knew Eddie’s guitar solos and his chord structures inside and out. And so he tried to bring in some of those classic Eddie-style parts.”
Encore, Thank You, Goodnight also features a chant of “Eddie” recorded during a Van Halen concert in Hawaii in 1995.
And if the backing vocals sound like classic Van Halen, that’s because they used an old trick courtesy of the guys who worked on the band’s classic albums — produced Ted Templeman and engineer Donn Landee.
The pair advised Hagar’s producer Dave Cobb to double Michael Anthony’s vocal and then add another of his vocal tracks to a double-tracked Hagar vocal.
As Hagar says: “We went in there, did that, and holy fuck, what a trick!”
