Eddie Van Halen died in 2020, but Sammy Hagar dreams about him “all the time.” In one of these dreams, the two were sharing a chill moment together and wrote the recently released track, “Encore, Thank You, Goodnight”.
“He had a guitar around his neck and we were having a love fest since we hadn’t seen each other in a long time,” Hagar tells Rolling Stone. “And he just started playing this riff, and I started singing.”
It took a few years, but Hagar finished the song with help from guitarist Joe Satriani, Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony, and drummer Kenny Aronoff.
Hagar will play it live for the first time at the kickoff to his Best of All Worlds Las Vegas residency on April 30. Until the video premieres, you can hear the track here.
“This was one hundred percent a communication from the beyond,” Hagar says, certain the dream wasn’t just an amalgamation of past memories of Van Halen. “There is no question about it.”
Each time Van Halen visits Hagar’s dreams, they come to an abrupt end once Hagar realises the guitarist has died. This time, however, he jumped up and started writing the song they were working on. “My wife’s screaming, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Writing a song!’ It just kept coming and coming. When I got up the next day, I grabbed my guitar and started to figure out the chords.”
Earlier this year, he decided to finish the song that had remained little more than some scribbles and a rough iPhone recording for the last two years. “I thought, ‘I’ll never write a song with Eddie again. This is the closest I can come to it,’” Hagar says. “When I told Joe about the dream and played him the thing he went, ‘Oh man. Hell yeah. Let’s finish that. That’s a cool song.’”
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To Hagar, there was never a question about who would be the right guitarist for the recording. Satriani had spent the past year playing Van Halen songs with him all across North America. “Joe’s a scholar,” says Hagar. “He knew Eddie’s guitar solos and his chord structures inside and out. And so he tried to bring in some of those classic Eddie-style parts.”
Anthony and Aronoff came on board a bit later to finish the song, along with producer Dave Cobb, who wanted to incorporate vintage Van Halen background vocals into the track. Struggling to find the exact sound they were after, they called on veteran Van Halen producers Don Landee and Ted Templeman. They instructed them to double Anthony’s vocal track and have him add a third vocal track to one of Hagar’s own double-stacked vocals. “Ted went, ‘He’s actually doing three parts, two of his and one of yours, and then you do the two parts,’” Hagar says. “We went in there, did that, and holy fuck, what a trick.”
Near the song’s end, they mixed the sound of a crowd chanting “Eddie” at an old Van Halen show. To find the right one, he’s scrolled through countless recordings for the perfect, clean audio of an “Eddie” chant. He found it on the 1995 Balance tour at the Neal S. Blaisdell Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.
“At all the other ones, I’d be yelling in the mic along with the crowd, or they’d be chanting, ‘Sammy/Eddie, Sammy/Eddie,’” says Hagar. “There was always something weird or wrong. And this one, because it was our last show, and we were in such turmoil, nobody said anything. We just let the crowd go. That’s some special shit. That part gives me the goosebumps, and it will every time. I can’t wait to play it live.”
The lyrics (“Thank you for the music/Thank you for the songs/Thank you for the visit, what took so long?”) express the immense gratitude Hagar has for Van Halen, and the bond the two still clearly share.
