Wolfgang Van Halen is playing a lot Apex Legends at this point, and he just got engaged to his longtime girlfriend. Otherwise, in addition to hosting a monthly SiriusXM show, he’s enjoying a brief period of “doing nothing” after a long tour behind his big debut album, Mammoth WVH, which has also had many years of production. of his one-man band, which becomes a real band on the road. Later this year, he will tour Europe for the first time and will be invited to two tribute concerts to Taylor Hawkins, one in Los Angeles on September 27 and the other in the UK on September 3 (Mammoth WVH also went start covering “My Hero” on stage after Hawkins ’death).
A year after the release of his debut, Wolfgang jumped on Zoom to share some thoughts on his next album, the future of his career, his time at Van Halen, the tribute his uncle Alex Van Halen was trying to plan for his late father. Eddie Van Halen, and more.
You said that your long-running album, which finally came out last June, was the product of “trial and error, doubts and anxiety …It’s also my way of living my life in general [laughs].
Yes, well, me too, man. But maybe you can expand it a little bit, because it was a long, long process to get to the debut.There was a lot of work. I didn’t know who he was before I started. I didn’t know what it would be. I just knew I had this dream of taking out a Dave Grohl and making an album on my own, you know, recording it all, writing it all down. And I wasn’t sure if I could do it. I didn’t know if I could sing. But my producer [Michael “Elvis” Baskette], when he heard me sing a couple of demos, he said, “You got it.” Overall, I am a person who doubts myself a lot. I’ve been raised for half my life, with everyone, outside of my inner circle of people who are kind to me, family, and friends, hating me vehemently and trying to convince me I’m not good enough. And I will not lie. That, at a young age, really gets in your head. And I have been abused by my trust throughout my life, in many different episodes with a handful of different people who have shaken me in different ways. And I’m still working on some of that, and many of these consequences of these incidents in my life have made me have a very bad opinion of myself. And it’s very hard to grab yourself and do something.
This should make it even more triumphant that you’ve released the album and gone on tour and had a great reception.Yes, it’s an amazing feeling. When you really look at everything we did last year, it’s a little crazy for a new rock band in 2021. So I’m very proud of the whole team. It’s really amazing
When you talk about negativity, you mean online, right?Yes. You know, it’s hard. You know, I spend my life trying to get, you know … You want people to like you, you think you’re a good person, you know, and then all these people who don’t know you have decided the person you are for who your parents are and what you do. We have become such a cynical place where everything is judged first. He is the one who can get the most cynical prey, instead of, you know, the real goodness. It is a very unpleasant world in many ways.
It’s easy to forget that you were just a teenager facing online hatred to replace an original Van Halen member.It’s something we can’t escape in this age of the Internet, and I don’t know, I just get really tired of it. It’s like, “You have nothing better to do?” Yeah Al that sounds pretty crap to me, Looks like BT aint for me either. At some point, man, it sucks like, “Come on.” Even if I hadn’t been to Van Halen before, there would still be people who hate me as much as them or more, but that really caused the fire to start. I’ll say it’s been a lot more positive since Mammoth came out. It’s the most positive thing the Internet has been for me.
And what were the betrayals of trust you are referring to?I don’t want to call people or anything, but people from my family have stolen from me. I’ve had people who I thought were friends in the end take advantage of me. I have had people with whom I have been in a relationship with abusers they trust. Deceive me, rob me. If you listen to the lyrics of Mammoth’s first album, it’s as if everything I write is aimed at this amalgam of people who took advantage of me.
What are some of the top experiences over the last year?Starting with the opening of Guns [N’ Roses] it had just been thrown into the fire in a really exciting way. Having the third show at Hershey Park in front of a sea of people was something I will never forget. I can’t thank the entire Guns crew enough. I think they were 28,000 and they change.
You played “Paradise City” with them, and Frank Sidoris, who is part of your band and Slash’s band, showed you the old part of Izzy Stradlin’s guitar, right?I had been playing it with Slash, and I said, “Dude, you have to teach me how to play this because I know the song, but I’ve never learned to play it.” That’s all I did on the bus this week. One night like 3 in the morning I was playing there for two hours.
When I saw your headliner set in New York, it seemed to me that the audience was really your fans, which should have felt great.Yes, it’s really crazy. It’s very gratifying to see that so many people really enjoy it.
Maybe there was a person in the audience waving a Frankenstrat flag, but I guess you just did that kind of thing?I have no problem. I feel like my position on Van Halen has been called out so strongly, as on the game’s phone. People say, “Oh, don’t mention Van Halen. He hates Van Halen!” It’s like, “It’s my fucking name! Why would I hate it? It’s my dad! I love my dad! He was on the fucking band! I don’t hate him at all.”
All I’ve said is that I don’t want to play Van Halen music on Mammoth shows. I’d rather bombard with my stuff than draw attention to play dad. We covered [Alice in Chains’] “The bones”. And before I touched it, I would tiptoe in and say, “Okay, we’ll do a cover right now.” And everyone goes there [whispers] “Van Halen!” And I said, “And I won’t play a Van Halen song,” and you’d hear people say “Awwwww.” And it became a dialogue, and I said, “What, don’t you think I love Van Halen?” I would always say that waiting to hear Van Halen on a Mammoth show is like waiting to hear Nirvana at a Foo Fighters concert. And get angry so they don’t play Nirvana!
I guess only once did they get Krist Novoselic on stage and in fact they played an encore of Nirvana.Yes. And when they played with Rick Astley, they played a “Smells Like Teen Spirit” version of “Never Gonna Give You Up.” So, in any case, it is a very, very rare fact. I think my point still holds! Don’t expect Van Halen from a Mammoth concert.
To be clear, you are not opening the door here.No, no, I don’t open the door. In any case, the door is very slightly cracked. Just because you should never say never. But don’t even take what I’m saying right now to say “Oh man, they’re going to play Van Halen!” I would say that if I play a Van Halen song on a show for the next 15 years, don’t come back to me like an idiot and go, [dumb-guy voice] “Well, you said you hated Van Halen!”
Well, good luck on the internet to fully understand what you just said.[Laughs.] I’m probably ruining things.
You started playing a new heavy song called “I Don’t Know at All” on tour. Will it be on the next record?More likely. I really like it. I don’t know if it will be a single or nothing. But it’s a song idea that was left over from the first album. There are about seven or 10 ideas left that were written at that time. And since then I’ve written many, many more. So there is a lot to choose from.
Were you writing on tour?Not too much, really. It was funny, when you go on tour, you say, “Oh man, I’ll play video games. I’ll go out and do this, I’ll do this.” And it’s like, “Not really.” Whenever I could sleep, I would take it. I was sleeping a lot. This is what I like to do most on tour.
I mean you’re already a big one going on tour. This is not a 22-year-old going on his first tour.I just care a lot. It’s my job, isn’t it? I think most people who just go out partying, drink and have a hangover, shit. Like, “Grow up, man.” And we also had a pretty strict Covid protocol. My general atmosphere is that it’s my job. My job is to give people the best performance. And if I was out there partying and being an idiot, I wouldn’t be giving my best performance. You know, I’ve been to a lot of different places where that really wasn’t the case. I like to be very professional.
If you didn’t write on tour, when did you write all this new music?I wrote a lot of ideas during my forties. And then, you know, random stuff here and there. I’ll just have an idea and just pull out my voice notes on the phone. And every free time I’ve had of touring, I started doing demos on that computer right here. So I just accumulated a lot of ideas in which I am very excited to start working. Some of them are different, which is exciting. I want to keep challenging myself and not keep doing the same things. It’s not crazy different, just different vibes and different things. Maybe even a little heavier, maybe even a little lighter. Just broaden that breadth of what the band can …