The Van Halen album Sammy Hagar couldn’t stomach: “It has zero creativity”
No one will argue with the person who called the shots in a band like Van Halen. Every band might like to talk themselves up as being a democracy, but when one of the band members is the name behind the band, their vote counts a little more than what the others think.
Sammy Hagar was more than happy to go along with what Eddie Van Halen was looking for out of the band, but he felt that his old buddies were treading water when making A Different Kind of Truth.
It’s not like Hagar was exactly safe from going into less creative territory. While every Van Halen album has had decent amounts of great material on it, their low point of the Hagar years was on Balance, which had a handful of great songs combined with filler that didn’t go anywhere and far outstays its welcome at nearly an hour in length.
The kind of work needed to make an album like that is hard enough, but Hagar’s refusal to return to work for a greatest-hits album led to him falling out with the rest of the band. If Hagar couldn’t get on the same page with The Van Halen brothers, he got the next best thing: taking bassist Michael Anthony with him.
As Hagar and Anthony started to work with the supergroup Chickenfoot, Van Halen rebranded themselves as a new band, bringing back original vocalist David Lee Roth and Eddie, bringing in his son Wolfgang to play bass on tour. While every sign pointed to them being a touring act for the rest of their days, they did go into the studio one more time for A Different Kind of Truth.
It’s not like their playing was the most inspiring thing in the world. In fact, most of the album featured Wolfie taking old riffs that he heard from his father, which convinced him to flesh out more for the album. This means that what you’re listening to is a Van Halen album that should have logically been released probably in 1981, only with a few rough edges.
While the record sold decently well amongst classic rock fans, Hagar didn’t really see the point in them making another record, telling Radio Metal, “I think they chose to take the easy route. (To) take some of their old stuff and re-record it instead of writing new songs. I don’t think the fans are going to be happy with it…I think there’s zero inspiration and zero creativity”.
Part of Hagar’s frustration likely came from how differently he approached songwriting compared to Eddie and Roth. During the Van Hagar years, the band had leaned further into melody and contemporary production, creating songs that were built from fresh jams and new ideas rather than revisiting the past.
A Different Kind of Truth felt more like an attempt to reconnect with the mythology of classic Van Halen, dusting off old demos and unfinished riffs to recreate the energy of their early club days rather than pushing forward creatively.
At the same time, that nostalgia was exactly what many fans wanted from the reunion. Roth back in the fold gave the album a swagger that had been absent from the band for decades, and tracks like ‘She’s the Woman’ and ‘Tattoo’ deliberately tapped into the sleazy California hard rock spirit that made Van Halen famous in the first place. Hagar may have viewed the record as a creative dead end, but for listeners who grew up on the band’s late-1970s sound, A Different Kind of Truth felt like one final glimpse of the original magic before the curtain finally came down.
Even if the band couldn’t get on the same page to make many new songs, their performances are at least admirable from a technical perspective. Eddie could still shred with the best of them, and hearing him get heavier with age certainly wasn’t something that the band had seen before on tracks like ‘As Is’ and ‘Bullethead’.
If there’s one Achilles heel to the album, it’s probably Roth’s vocal performance. It’s easy to cut him some slack since he was expected to sing vocal lines just as well as he did in his 20s, but there are more than a few moments on the record where he’s supposed to be going for a high note before his vocal cords give him a middle finger and crap out.
Still, A Different Kind of Truth is certainly far from a bad record, and since Eddie’s tragic passing, it will end up being the final Van Halen album that we will ever see. If anything, fans should just consider themselves lucky that this exists. Because without this album, people wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing that Van Halen III was the last album the band ever made.
