Wolfgang Van Halen on His Next Album, That Eddie Van Halen Tribute, and More

July 17, 2022 9:00AM ET
Exclusive: Wolfgang Van Halen on His Next Album, That Eddie Van Halen Tribute, Internet Hate, and Much More

“People are like, ‘He hates Van Halen,’” the Mammoth WVH frontman says in a frank new interview. “It’s like, ‘It’s my fucking name! Why would I hate it? It’s my dad! I love my dad! I was in the fucking band!”
By Brian Hiatt

Wolfgang Van Halen is playing a lot of Apex Legends at the moment, and just got engaged to his longtime girlfriend. Otherwise, besides hosting a monthly SiriusXM show, he’s enjoying a brief period of “doing nothing” after a long run of touring behind his well-received, years-in-the-making powerhouse of a debut album, Mammoth WVH — also the name of his one-man band, which becomes an actual band on the road. Later this year, he’ll tour Europe for the first time, and is set to be a guest at two Taylor Hawkins tribute concerts, one in Los Angeles Sept. 27, the other in the U.K. Sept. 3 (Mammoth WVH also started covering “My Hero” onstage after Hawkins’ death).

A year after the release of his debut, Wolfgang jumped on Zoom to share some thoughts on his next album, the future of his career, his time in Van Halen, the tribute his uncle Alex Van Halen was trying to plan for his late father, Eddie Van Halen, and much more.

Q: You said that your long-in-the-works album, which finally came out last June, was the product of “trial and error and self-doubt and anxiety…
A: It’s also just the way I live my life in general [laughs].

Q: Yeah, well, me too, man. But maybe you can expand a little bit on that, because it was a long, long process to get to the debut.
A: There was a lot of work. I didn’t know who I was before it started. I didn’t know what it was going to be. I just knew I had this dream of pulling a Dave Grohl and doing an album all on my own — you know, recording everything, writing everything. And I wasn’t sure if I could do it. I didn’t know if I could sing. But my producer [Michael "Elvis" Baskette], when he heard me sing a couple demos, he was like, “You’ve got this.” In general, I’m a very self-doubting person. I’ve been raised for half my life, with everyone — outside of my inner circle of people who are kind to me, and family and friends — vehemently hating me and trying to convince me that I’m not good enough. And I won’t lie. That, at a young age, really gets in your head. And I’ve had my trust abused throughout my life, in many different episodes with a handful of different people that have really shaken me up in different ways. And I’m still working through some of that, and a lot of that sort of fallout from those incidents in my life has resulted in me having a really poor opinion on myself. And it’s really difficult to kind of pick yourself up and get anything done.

Q: That must make it all the more triumphant that you got the album out and went on tour and got a great reception.
A: Yeah, it’s an amazing feeling. When you really look at everything that we’ve done in the past year, it’s kind of crazy for a new rock band in 2021. So I’m really proud of the whole team. It’s really amazing

Q: When you were talking about negativity, you mean online, right?
A: Yeah. You know, it’s hard. You know, I spend my life trying to get, you know … You want people to like you, you think you’re a nice person, you know, and then all these people who don’t know you have decided the person that you are because of who your parents are and what you do. We’ve become such a cynical place where everything is judged first. It’s who can get the most cynical hot take, rather than, you know, actual kindness. It’s a very unkind world out there in many aspects.

Keep Reading: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/wolfgang-van-halen-mammoth-wvh-album-eddie-tribute-1383846/