About a year after Eddie Van Halen died in 2020, Sammy Hagar had a dream that they were sharing a chill moment together. “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 several years, but Hagar ultimately finished the song, which he wound up calling “Encore, Thank You, Goodnight,” with help from guitarist Joe Satriani, Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony, and drummer Kenny Aronoff. The video will premiere April 27 when Hagar performs at Stagecoach, and he’ll play it live for the first time at the kickoff to his Best of All Worlds Las Vegas residency on April 30. But you can hear a 45-second sample right now.
To Hagar, the dream wasn’t merely an amalgamation of Eddie Van Halen memories seeping out of his subconsciousness. “This was one hundred percent a communication from the beyond,” he says. “There is no question about it. I dream about Eddie all the time, quite honestly.”
Each time, the dream ends immediately once Hagar realizes that the guitarist has died. This time, he says, he woke up so quickly that he remembered the song they were working on in great detail. “I just grabbed a pad and a pencil,” he said. “And I got my iPhone, 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.”
For two years, the song remained little more than a rough iPhone recording, some scribbles, and a vivid memory of a dream. But earlier this year, he decided it was time to finish it with help from Satriani. “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.’”
The lyrics (“Thank you for the music/Thank you for the songs/Thank you for the good times”) express gratitude toward Eddie, and the many good years they shared together. Hagar had no doubt that Satriani was the right guitarist for the recording after spending 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 were recruited a bit later to finish the song, along with Nashville producer Dave Cobb, who wanted to incorporate vintage Van Halen background vocals into the track. After struggling to find the exact formula, they called up veteran Van Halen producers Don Landee and Ted Templeman. They instructed them to double Anthony’s vocal track, and then 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. “‘And then you have it.’ We went in there, did that, and holy fuck, what a trick.’”
Near the end of the song, 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, searching for a moment with clean audio of an “Eddie” chant. He found it on the final stop of 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.”
