“I was like, ‘My life is completely empty and I need something to give me purpose’”: How Wolfgang Van Halen turned to music to cope with his father’s death
In an interview with Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan on his podcast The Magnificent Others, Wolfgang Van Halen has spoken about the pressure he feels being the son of the late Eddie Van Halen, and how he coped with his passing.
“I spent 2015 to 2018 making the first record [Mammoth WVH] but then when my dad got sick I kind of put everything on hold. It wasn’t until he passed in 2020 that I was like: “My life is completely empty and I need something to give me purpose. That’s what I’m still doing to this day.”
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Wolfgang speaks openly about his father’s influence on his career as a musician, adding that he knew his dad was immensely proud of him. “In the absence of my father, which is a heavy absence that I’m dealing with to this day – his pride in me was so large that in its absence there’s just this black hole sitting there.”
While Wolfgang played Van Halen from the young age of 15, he wants people to judge him on his own merit. “I would rather make my own name. Unfortunately, when I have the name Van Halen, that’s a bit tough to do,” he says. “I want to earn this. I don’t want to be given anything.”
Wolfgang address the scrutiny he faces for either not sounding enough like his father, or sounding too much like him. “It’s a really funny put down of ‘You’ll never be your dad’ and it’s like no, I’m not, and nobody else ever will be,” he says. “[People] want me to either sound like Van Halen or want me to play Van Halen. They want me to be like my dad but if I was, I’m riding coattails … I’m just doing what makes me happy.”
Wolfgang put out the self-titled Mammoth WVH album with his band of the same name in 2021, shortly after his father passed away following complications from throat cancer. The follow-up, Mammoth II, arrived in 2023, a few months before his marriage to Andraia Allsop. As he explains, those moments can be bittersweet. “There’s so much that I can’t share with him. He never got to see what happened with Mammoth. He never got to see me get married. He never got to see me have kids eventually. Those are tentpole moments that will always have a tinge of sadness no matter what.”
If there’s one thing that seems clear from his interview with The Smashing Pumpkins’ Corgan, it’s that Wolfgang feels secure in the knowledge that his father would admire the way his life is going. “I know he’d be proud,” he smiles, “He’d be losing it.”
The post “I was like, ‘My life is completely empty and I need something to give me purpose’”: How Wolfgang Van Halen turned to music to cope with his father’s death appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
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