Sammy Hagar‘s guitar playing on his upcoming single “Encore. Thank You. Goodnight.” was divinely inspired. That is, if you are one of the many who believe that his late Van Halen bandmate Eddie Van Halen was our greatest six-string god.
“About two months ago, I had this dream and Eddie came. We were in a room like this, [with] a bunch of people around. It was just like he’d been gone. It was not like he was passed, but he had just been out of my life and we hadn’t seen each other for a while,” Hagar told Ultimate Classic Rock about the inspiration for the song back in 2022. “He’s going, ‘Man, let’s write some music!’ I said, ‘Yeah, f–k it, man. Here, let’s go!’”
Hagar described huddling in a corner of a room with Van Halen — who died in Oct. 2020 due to complications from throat cancer at age 65 — and watching the guitar guru play him a lick that sounded just like “the last lick that Eddie Van Halen showed me, when I went back for the [2004] reunion tour and when he was a mess. I said, ‘Eddie, show me your newest s–t,’ because every time I’d be around him I’d say, ‘Show me your newest s–t.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, check this out!’”
In the dream, Hagar said Van Halen showed him “this harmonic thing… he slid up to a chord, like a slide guitar. We wrote a song with that lick.” The next morning, the veteran rock singer and guitarist said he got up and wrote the new song, which he titled, in part, “Thank You” because he’d used “the f–kin’ lick that he showed me in the song.”
And while the track came together too late to be included on Hagar’s 2022 Crazy Times album with his band the Circle, on Instagram earlier this week Hagar said he “can’t wait” for the world to finally hear his tribute to his late bandmate. Hagar took over as VH’s lead vocalist from 1985-1996 and again from 2003-2005, and like his predecessor, original VH singer David Lee Roth, had a sometimes contentious relationship with EVH. “I can’t wait for the world to hear this very special song Joe [Satriani] and I wrote as a long overdue thank you to Eddie Van Halen for the music, the good times, and the dream that inspired this track, ‘Encore, Thank You, Goodnight.’”
The post describes the song that also features Satriani, drummer Kenny Aronoff and former VH bassist Michael Anthony as “inspired by a dream and brought to reality through introspective lyrics, powerful chords and rhythmic guitar and drums.”
