Alex Van Halen says he’s getting ready to make a new album with guitar ace Steve Lukather, a longtime friend of Alex and his brother, the late Eddie Van Halen.
Talking with Iron Maiden’s Nicko McBrain for the Metal Sticks podcast, the Van Halen drummer offered few details about the project.
“I’m getting ready to do this record with Lukather and a couple other people,” Van Halen said. “It should be exciting.”
Asked if they’d begun rehearsing, Van Halen replied, “No, we don't need to rehearse,” and laughed.
“There's a lot to be said for spontaneity,” he added. “That's how we did a lot of things together in the studio. [Eddie] would just play and we would just take snippets of it, and then you elaborate on little ideas and make a song out of it. Beethoven made a whole symphony out of [snippets],” he added, before singing the opening notes from the composer’s famed Fifth Symphony.
Van Halen also spoke of his close friendship with Lukather.
“If you're in this line of work… it goes beyond a superficial contract, and ‘I want you to do this and do that.’ We do it because we like something, or we want to do it because it's creative. The moment you get into contracts that are very specific about what your role in the project is, it falls apart. That's our experience anyway.
“And we've known Lukather for a long time. He was one of the real, real true best friends.”
Van Halen’s announcement is the first he’s said about his work with Lukather in nearly a year. Last March, the drummer announced that he was working with the guitarist to create a new album of tracks from Eddie Van Halen’s unfinished demos.
“Ed and Steve Lukather were very good friends, and they often worked together,” Van Halen told the Dutch newspaper De Telegraf. “There is no one who can do this process with me as well as he can.”
Soon afterward, Lukather added context to Van Halen’s announcement, noting that he would not be playing guitar on the album,
“I will not ever play a guitar note on a Van Halen song,” he said. “Al asked me to help him go thru a ton of unfinished recordings of Al and Ed writing and recording that never saw the light of day. As of now that’s all I got.”
Lukather and Eddie Van Halen first crossed paths on projects in the 1980s. Both men worked on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” on which Eddie played the electric guitar solo at the invitation of producer Quincy Jones. Eddie performed bass on a song from Lukather’s 1989 solo debut and contributed to a track on Luke’s 2003 holiday album, SantaMental.
“I’m very honored to have been Ed's friend — really a friend,” he told Metal Master Kingdom, “not just a guitar buddy who had a beer with him once. [There is] 40-plus years with him, Al and I."
