Ahead of the release of his memoir, Brothers, set to drop on October 22, Van Halen drummer Alex Van Halen is opening up about his tenure with the group and his unwavering relationship with late brother, Eddie Van Halen, in an all-encompassing Rolling Stone interview available now.
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During his wide-ranging discussion with Rolling Stone, titled My Brother, Eddie Van Halen: Alex Van Halen Tells All. Alex admits after his brother Eddie’s passing in 2020 his entire world came crashing down, “I shut down. I was yelling and screaming. I was beside myself,” he explains, which eventually led to a PTSD diagnosis.
“I just miss him. I miss the arguments. I live with it every day. And I can’t bring him back. I can’t make things right,” Alex adds of the empty place in his heart left with the passing of Eddie, although he still feels his presence on a daily basis. “He was there this morning,” he says. “He’s fine. Wherever he is — he’s fine.”
Also during the interview, Alex touched upon the failed tribute concerts that were being planned with original singer David Lee Roth after Eddie’s passing, saying “I can be honest about this now… The thing that broke the camel’s back, was I said, ‘Dave, at some point, we have to have a very overt — not a bowing — but an acknowledgment of Ed in the gig.’ And the moment I said we gotta acknowledge Ed, Dave f***in’ popped a fuse.”
Looking back now, he believes deciding to tour without Eddie would have been a mistake. “The heart and the soul and the creativity and the magic was Dave, Ed, Mike [Anthony], and me,” while adding, “we had a lot of other singers over the years,” without naming past frontmen Sammy Hagar or Gary Cherone.
With an eye toward the future, Alex reveals he has plenty of unreleased Van Halen music in the vaults, but not many completed works. “They’re all little pieces,” he says. “A bunch of licks don’t make a song,” he explains, but with the advent of AI, the possibilities are endless. “The patterns of how Edward would have played something,” he says, could bring about guitar solos that sound just like he is playing them. “Ideally,” Alex adds, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant would be the singer for a new project, although he admits they haven’t spoken since the early ‘90s. “You’re gonna think I’m out of my f***ing mind,” Alex adds, “But when conditions are right, things will manifest.”
In the meantime, Alex is busy at work, slowly putting together a Van Halen biopic. “It’s just a long-term plan,” he says. “To put things in perspective, the Queen movie took 30 years to make.”
Alex Van Halen's Brothers is set to arrive on October 22. Read the full Rolling Stone interview with Alex right HERE.