In a new interview with Jeremy White, Incubus co-founder and guitarist Mike Einziger talked about Van Halen’s discography. He pointed out that while some of their older material might not have the best production or mixing, the music is still amazing.
When the interviewer brought up Eddie Van Halen and his gear, Einziger shared that he hadn’t thought much about it until the former bassist, Ben Kenney, pointed it out to him. “Ben, our longtime bass player, there was one time where he was making jokes about how bad certain Van Halen recording sounded,” he recalled. “I always was kind of like, in my mind, ‘What are you talking about? Those recordings sound amazing!’ He was like, ‘No, they don’t. They sound like sh*t.’”
“And then I went back and was listening to them,” Einziger added. “And I was like, ‘Actually, they sound kind of sh*tty.’ Like, some of them sound really sh*tty. But it doesn’t f*cking matter. It really doesn’t matter.”
It’s not clear which songs are exactly the ‘sh*tty’ sounding ones, but one of Van Halen’s songs was done just in one take.
“They had already recorded an instrumental version, and I wrote those lyrics,” Sammy Hagar explained in an interview. “I came home, picked up the microphone, and read the lyrics to the track. I was just roughing it. It worked so good, and it was one take, and I wrote those friggin lyrics away from them, and they wrote the music away from me, and it was like [a] perfect song. I didn’t change one word.”
In other news, Incubus just performed at the Rock in Rio festival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on September 15. The band’s next show is at HFStival in Washington DC on September 21.