“Do you see Taylor Swift shredding scales? I don’t think so”: Wolfgang Van Halen explains why fans who expect him to shred like Eddie are missing the point
He may be the son of one of rock guitar’s greatest shredders, but Wolfgang Van Halen has argued that “shredding” is rarely the point – and that fans who expect him to play like his father Eddie are missing the bigger picture.
Speaking on the Song Cake podcast, the Mammoth leader addresses the fixation certain listeners have with his technique, and shares how reducing music to shred metrics does a disservice to what makes songs matter.
When host Phil Wilding notes that rock fans and critics often zero in on the playing rather than the writing, Wolfgang didn’t hesitate to agree.
READ MORE: “It’s not about having a guy jumping around on stage… It’s about playing the f**k out of your instruments”: Wolfgang Van Halen on what really matters onstage
“I think that’s the big thing where people tend to lose focus,” he says. “Especially when it comes to be they just sit there and go, ‘Oh, he doesn’t play as well as his dad,’ or ‘It’s not as good as this Van Halen song.’”
“It’s all focused on the fact that I might not be tapping well enough in their opinion, or not playing well enough, rather than, ‘hey, isn’t it cool that I created this whole thing by myself with all these different pieces, all these different parts?’”
The guitarist also emphasises that his priorities are the same as his father’s were – even if listeners sometimes forget.
“It’s about the song construction at the end of the day, for me, as it was for Dad, even though people seem to focus on the playing,” Wolfgang explains. “It’s about creating the song. Because if you don’t have that, you have just shredding through scales. And there’s not really much soul on that.”
To stress the point, Wolfgang draws attention to megastar Taylor Swift, who was voted eighth best guitarist of the last two decades in a 2024 poll conducted by UK guitar retailer guitarguitar.
“Do you see Taylor Swift shredding scales?” he asks. “I don’t think so. She writes a song that makes you feel stuff. At the end of the day, if you’ve got a melody and a song that makes you feel things, makes you remember somebody you lost, makes you miss something, makes you think of being back home, at the end of the day, that’s what a song is about.”
While there’s “room for shreddiness and stuff,” Wolfgang concedes, “at the end of the day, like I mentioned, that’s what it’s about for me.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
