“Looking at the big picture”: Eddie Van Halen names the most vulnerable album of his career
Active from 1973 to 2020, Van Halen had a long run. It was a stretch that seemed to take the band through every possible phase and experience a musician could have, from the strife of the early days to the hard-earned breakthrough, onwards through the creative rifts and the collaboration issues, the struggles to maintain success and the stress of living up to their own legacy. In the midst of that, it can be hard to keep a focus. It’s easy to get tunnel visioned or clouded by other issues. But when reflecting on one record, Eddie Van Halen always saw it as a moment the band cleared all that away.
Realistically, the pressure in the band always fell on Eddie Van Halen’s shoulders because their legacy did too. They were a group built on his talent and virtuosity. His guitar riffs and skills always led the way, colouring every song and guiding them, era to era. While the rest of the group was talented and supportive, so much of it always came down to Van Halen himself, meaning that each time a new album would come around and the band had to get back to work, the demand on his creative brain was a lot.
It’s a lot to pack on one man’s talent, but luckily, he had heaps of it. He had enough to colour 12 albums and sufficient to make the group one of the most formative and successful rock bands to ever exist. But for a long time, Van Halen’s only way to get through the work was to focus in, narrowing his mind rather than expanding it.
For many of their albums, he focused on writing hits and catchy hooks. But then, one late-stage album seemed to crack him open, and suddenly, he was being honest.
It seems poetic that they decided to call that album Van Halen III, adding a third to the self-titled series that started their career. Reconnecting to the first records he ever made, the choice to return to a simple name seems to reflect the atmosphere it was made in, as Van Halen returned to the honesty and vulnerability of those albums, too. They were his first bold steps into the music world, before the industry had a chance to make him jaded, shy or exhausted. Decades later, in 1998, the choice to come back to the series captured how he felt about that album, and about the way he’d let more of himself and his emotions into it.
When asked what the songs on that record say, his response to Guitar World was moving. “They’d say, I’m just an open wound, I’m letting it flow. I’m not afraid to fall on my face. There’s mistakes, there’s slop, there’s whatever–but it’s real emotion. It’s human. It’s really me at my most vulnerable. It was not planned,” Van Halen said, reflecting on the emotion in the album.
But that was only achieved through opening up, not just his feelings, but also his eyes and creative mind. It was an album specifically made on a mission to get rid of tunnel vision and return to how things used to be, which is also reflected in the recording process.
“Most of them are live takes,” he recalled as the band endeavoured to get as close to something raw and real as possible. It allowed Van Halen to drop into the same sort of flow state he always found on stage, no longer stressing about nailing a perfect guitar part but barely even feeling like he did anything to create it, stating, “Actually, I don’t remember playing the guitar.”
His feelings towards the album and the process of making it were simple; “I was looking at the big picture,” he said as Van Halen III was a needed late-stage reset for the enduring rock star.
