Eddie Van Halen had a recording studio in his home for several decades and ended up recording a lot more music in his life than what made it onto Van Halen's 12 studio albums.
In a 2008 interview with Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt, Eddie suggested that he had hours — if not days or weeks — worth of unreleased music in his basement.
Eddie claimed he had "close to a million CDs, cassettes, boxes and boxes and boxes," spanning genres from rock to classical to world music. And that was 12 years ago. Hiatt played an excerpt from the interview on a recent edition of the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast.
"The stuff is gonna come out," Eddie said at the time. "Hopefully people will enjoy the many sides of me. I trip on it myself."
While there probably aren't "millions" of recordings, the general spirit of Eddie's claim is supported by a 1998 studio tour he did with then-MTV news reporter Chris Connelly, which you can watch at the top of this page.
Eddie shows the MTV cameras a cavernous room packed full of tapes — many shelves of which are only accessible by a ladder — containing music he'd written and recorded at home. He goes on to lament how his system of archiving what each tape contained was disrupted when his computer "took a dump on us" and lost all the catalog data.
"So all this stuff is waiting to be archived by somebody?" Connelly asked.
"Yeah," Eddie replied. "And the only person who can do that is me. Because nobody knows what I like."
But the task of combing through the tapes has to fall on somebody. That will likely be Eddie's brother and VH co-founder Alex Van Halen and his son Wolfgang, according Van Halen manager Irving Azoff.
"I can't predict that for sure there will be anything new, but for sure they're going to look at it," Azoff told Pollstar.
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