This glorious weekend has seen us blessed with not one, but two, brand new tracks from Wolfgang Van Halen. Eddie Van Halen’s son dropped the bangers titled ‘Think It Over’ and ‘Don’t Back Down’ and also released a video along with the latter.
Wolfgang Van Halen chatted with Rolling Stone about the new releases and revealed that ‘Think it Over’ is his late father’s favorite song.
“With ‘Don’t Back Down’ I really leaned into a fight-song mentality,” Wolfgang said. “The kind of thing you hear when you’re at a sports game and you want your team to really fuck up the other team. ‘Think It Over’ is super-poppy, the most Jimmy Eat World-ish song I’ve got. It’s one of my favorite songs, and it was my dad’s favorite song.”
Of course, Wolfgang is a one man act – something he has fun with in the ‘Don’t Back Down’ video. The clip begins with a casual Wolfgang strolling into his dad’s 5150 studio wearing a tracksuit and asks his ‘bandmates’ -who are actually Wolfgang Van Halen too – where Wolfgang’s at.
The trio of Wolfgang’s on guitar and bass then wait for their fourth Wolfgang who’s late and comes shuffling in apologetically before jumping on the drums. By the end of the clip we see another two Wolfgang’s who pose as a producer and engineer.
“I always thought it would be a fun thing to do a series of videos, maybe not just this one, where it’s just a whole bunch of Wolfs putting it together,” Wolfgang told Rolling Stone of making the clip.
The video then heads down a different avenue, with a hard rock riff taking over followed by the sound of thundering drums. Both tracks will feature on Wolfgang Van Halen’s debut album Mammoth WVH which is scheduled be released June 11, 2021.
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Earlier this month Wolfgang shared that he was upset by the short tribute his later father, Eddie Van Halen, received at the Grammys.
“I didn’t realize they would only show Pop for 15 seconds in the middle of four full performances for others we had lost,” he said.
However, Wolfgang fondly reflected on his fathers relaxed personality sharing that he would have met the inadequate memorial with a sense of humour. “I know Pop would probably just laugh it off and say, ‘Eh, who gives a shit?’ He was only about the music anyway. The rest didn’t matter.”
Watch the music video for ‘Don’t Back Down’ by Wolfgang Van Halen below:
