The terrible song Eddie Van Halen got outvoted on: “Everyone else liked it”
It doesn’t matter how talented you are; sometimes it’s understandable that one might get bored with the sound of their own material, especially if you feel as though it doesn’t offer anything new.
While Eddie Van Halen was always an exemplary guitarist on all of his releases, there came a point in his career in his eponymous group, Van Halen, where he was more than a little fed up with the direction in which he found his compositions were going.
Their self-titled 1975 debut album was a tour de force of hard rock and heavy metal styles all wrapped up in a whirlwind of inimitable musicianship, unlike many things that had been heard before. While they may have easily been categorised as a heavy metal act, it was clear from the way they structured their songs and presented themselves that they were equally into pop music and wanted to write hooks just as much as they wanted to blow listeners away with impenetrable riffs.
However, as things progressed, the band started to be drawn further away from the heavier sound, and were succumbing more than ever to their pop tendencies towards the mid-1980s. You can hear them still enjoying themselves as elements of glam rock began to pervade their output on records like 1984, but after this point, they hit some career lows with 5150 and OU812, seemingly spent on all ideas of how to rejuvenate their sound.
This trajectory would continue into the ‘90s, with the release of the very unsubtly-named For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (that stands for ‘fuck’, if you hadn’t noticed), and Eddie Van Halen was particularly unbothered by where things were going during the process of creating the record. In a 2009 interview with Forbes, the guitarist reflected on how much he petitioned to not include certain songs on the album, purely because of how much he thought it wasn’t up to scratch.
Van Halen attempted to caveat his statements by saying that even his favourite artists are prone to writing songs that he’s not a fan of, so there’s every reason that he might not love some of his own material.
“I love Tori Amos, [but] not everything she does,” he began. “I love Peter Gabriel, not everything he does. I don’t even like everything I do.”
He continued by making reference to the song he found to be particularly egregious from the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge sessions. “Sometimes I’ll write something, for instance, a song called ‘Top Of The World’,” he explained.
Adding, “Everyone else liked it, I didn’t. I got outvoted and I wrote the damn song, it ended up on the record, I didn’t like the song, everyone else did. I got outvoted. It’s personal preference, that’s all music is.”
While music may be subjective, and some members of the group were fans of what Van Halen had written enough to suggest it ought to be released as a single, it certainly didn’t strike much of a chord with their fanbase, with it only reaching a disappointingly low peak of number 27 on the Billboard charts.
Perhaps Van Halen was right to try to get the song axed, but then again, he’s absolutely right to acknowledge that you don’t have to like everything you come up with.
