The greatest song of Sammy Hagar’s career: “That song is pretty special”
There’s a good chance that every rock and roll singer would love to have the career Sammy Hagar ended up with. Despite being one of the progenitors of hard rock with Montrose and becoming a solo star in his own right, his time in Van Halen is the kind of minor miracle that doesn’t even seem possible for a group that relied so heavily on the showmanship of David Lee Roth.
To be a part of one of the most successful bands of all time should be the pinnacle of your career. It should be the finest moment of your life, the rest of your career a collection of valleys and troughs in comparison to the mountainous heights of the group. Hagar prided himself on being a cut above the rest, though, but out of all the songs he worked on, he still thought the track ‘Kama’ was a bit close to the chest.
Then again, half the reason Hagar’s material works so well is that they are universal. They aren’t necessarily designed to make you think too hard all the time, but for every song like ‘Poundcake’, there’s something like ‘Dreams’ that tugs at someone’s heartstrings in just the right way.
Even as far back as Montrose, Hagar was leaning towards talking about the broader questions of life. He was barely out of his teens, but the values that he discusses in ‘Make It Last’ are still relevant to anyone struggling with their lives, practically begging them to treat every day like it’s the last one they’ll ever get.
For all of the philosophical questions he had, though, anyone can find themselves slipping into dad rock every now and again, and ‘Kama’ is one of the few tunes where Hagar gets sentimental. While far from being the worst Hagar cut in the world, hearing Hagar sing about his daughter is one of the more heartwarming tracks that he would ever write, complete with a riff that’s actually far nastier than really should make sense on a tearjerker like this.
Even after stepping out of Van Halen’s shadow in the late 1990s, Hagar thought that the track was more indicative of what he wanted his music to stand for, saying, “That song is pretty special, not just ’cause it’s about her, but because lyrically for love to mean… Kama to mean love in Sanskrit. And then if you listen to the words it’s a nice little twist. I think poetically, and even just philosophically, it’s probably the greatest thing I’ve ever done.”
It’s a perfectly balanced piece of rock poetry, which is often very tough to pull off. Such earnest behaviour could, very often, leave a rock singer in the very tricky spot of looking like a fool. To write such a vulnerable song about love itself is double jeopardy. Yet, somehow, he gets away with it.
Although this could have easily come off as cringy in the wrong hands, it’s hard to knock points off it when Hagar is this sincere. He does have a few moments where he seems to lay the personal angle on pretty thick, but it doesn’t really matter when Hagar makes you believe every word he is singing.
And really, is it all that different from the other heartwarming stories that other older rock stars have made? If we can excuse tracks like Queen’s ‘Delilah’ written for Freddie Mercury’s cat or John Lennon penning ‘Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)’ for his son, surely Hagar singing about his daughter can be excused as well.
If anything, ‘Kama’ is actually a bit influential in its own weird way, considering that Dave Grohl eventually turned to make this kind of parental tune on ‘Miracle’ from the Foo Fighters album In Your Honor. It might not have been necessarily cool, but when you quote your own heart in song, there’s hardly anyone who can critique you for it.
