The lost 1980s song Eddie Van Halen wrote for Nancy Wilson: “It was a really beautiful acoustic piece”
Rock music as we know and love it today wouldn’t be the same without innovative minds who made it this way. Two huge names who have helped the evolution of rock are Eddie Van Halen and Nancy Wilson.
There is no escaping the fact that Eddie Van Halen contributed a great deal to the world of rock music, both with his unique guitar tone and with the way that he played. He brought the masses a kind of sound that hadn’t previously been explored, and the portrayal of rock ‘n’ roll was never the same.
When he passed away, the entire world of rock mourned, as they knew that the genre had lost one of its greatest assets. Nancy Wilson was among those who grew deeply sad at the news of Eddie’s passing, as not only did she think of him as an exceptional guitarist, but also a great friend.
“It was such a sad day for rock ’n’ roll when the Einstein of guitar players had to disappear,” she said. “Eddie always played with such joy. He had that three-mile smile.”
Of course, Nancy Wilson is also a musical innovator herself. A lot of the guitar work she played for Heart has cemented her as one of the greatest wielders of the six-string in rock history. Not to mention, she came up during a time when rock was an incredibly male-dominated industry. As such, when she started playing, a lot of her fellow musicians looked down on her. It took a great deal of skill not just to play how she did, but to overcome the barriers that were placed in front of her that didn’t exist for her male counterparts.
“I just felt special and accomplished. And kind of like a show-off,” said Wilson when talking about becoming a female guitar legend. “I was showing off my skills that nobody expected to see. Because I’d worked really hard at learning how to play, from the age of nine when I saw The Beatles on TV. For a lot of my life, I’d hear: ‘Pretty good for a girl.’ But I didn’t care. I was just so proud, and I kind of had an ego about it.”
Two great guitarists, both of whom had great respect for each other, and both of whom had spent time on the road with one another. In the ‘80s, both Heart and Van Halen went on tour, taking their stellar guitar technique to the masses. While travelling, Nancy and Eddie would talk at length about their histories with the six-string, which is when Wilson found out that Eddie had never owned an acoustic guitar.
“We were on tour with them in the eighties, and Eddie told me one night after a show that he didn’t own a single acoustic guitar,” she recalled. “So I took my favourite Ovation and walked it up to his room and handed it to him.”
Nancy woke up the next morning to a phone call from Eddie, telling her that he’d written a song on the acoustic guitar for her: “At the crack of dawn the next day – obviously he’d been up all night [laughs] – he called my hotel room and he said: ‘Hey, I wrote something for you on the guitar you gave me. Check it out!’”
She recalled, “He was probably sitting cross-legged on his bed with the receiver of the phone there, and I was just lying there and listening.”
That recording has since been lost, but Nancy recalls that it was a beautiful piece, and she subsequently wrote her own ode to Eddie on her solo album when news of his passing broke. “It was a really beautiful acoustic piece,” she concluded. “I so wish I could hear it again.”
