Sammy Hagar Says Eddie Van Halen Helped Him Write a Song in a Dream
Former Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar and his supergroup The Circle have plenty going on right now as they prepare to release album number two, Crazy Times, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t working on new music. As it turns out, the singer had a special collaborator on a new song he wrote: the late Eddie Van Halen, who Hagar says appeared in a dream.
“Nobody knows this but Michael Anthony, Jason [Bonham] and Vic [Johnson]. About two months ago, I had this dream and Eddie came. We were in a room like this, [with] a bunch of people around. It was just like he’d been gone. It was not like he was passed, but he had just been out of my life and we hadn’t seen each other for a while. He’s going, ‘Man, let’s write some music!’ I said, ‘Yeah, fuck it, man. Here, let’s go!’”
Hagar doesn’t just expect you to take his word for it. The singer explains exactly how the dream went down:
“[He] went over into a corner, in this room. He had a guitar and he played me this thing. It was like this lick – [just like] the last lick that Eddie Van Halen showed me, when I went back for the [2004] reunion tour and when he was a mess. I said, ‘Eddie, show me your newest shit,’ because every time I’d be around him I’d say, ‘Show me your newest shit.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, check this out!’”
He adds:
“He did this harmonic thing and he slid it up to a chord, like a slide guitar. We wrote a song with that lick. I remembered it. I got up in the morning and I wrote the song. It’s called, ‘Thank You.’ I used the fuckin’ lick that he showed me in the song. I told Jason, ‘I just really don’t know what to say lyrically.’ I’ve got goosebumps, head to toe, [talking about it]. So I wrote it [about that experience], and we’ll do that song someday.”
While kind of a ridiculous claim, I’m not really one to scoff at the thought of getting another Eddie Van Halen guitar performance. The late Van Halen’s former bandmate intends to share the credit with his former collaborator and stresses that he doesn’t want it to be a cash in.
“Now, that’s going to be an Eddie-influenced song, to the point that I’m going to co-write it with him. I’m going to give him credit and then maybe we’ll donate the money to charity, whatever,” Hagar says. “You see, I feel so embarrassed about it because everyone’s going to say, ‘Oh, look at Sammy trying to capitalize on Eddie.’ No, I’m not. You don’t understand. This was a real fuckin’ dream, and I told you exactly what happened in it.”
Stranger things have happened, right?
