The guitarist Eddie Van Halen formed with his brother Alex back in 1972 the legendary Hard Rock band baptized with their surname. They eventually recruited the vocalist David Lee Roth and bassist Michael Anthony, completing their classic line-up which would record the band’s most successful albums.
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Over the decades Eddie proved he was one of the most influential guitar players of all time but curiously he had a really broad musical taste. During his career, he gave his opinion on many other artists, including the former Genesis vocalist Peter Gabriel.
What was Eddie Van Halen’s opinion on Peter Gabriel
Eddie actually loved Peter Gabriel and his favorite album was “So”, released in 1986 by the former Genesis singer. He even said a few times that it was actually the last album that he bought in his life, because after that he wasn’t really listening to new bands.
In an interview with Forbes back in 2009, he praised the artist, saying: “I love Peter Gabriel, not everything he does, I don’t even like everything I do. Sometimes I’ll write something, for instance a song called “Top Of The World,” everyone else liked it, I didn’t. I got outvoted and I wrote the damn song, it ended up on the record. (But) I didn’t like the song, everyone else did. I got outvoted. It’s personal preference, that’s all music is,” Eddie Van Halen said.
“So” was Peter Gabriel’s fifth solo studio album It’s his best-selling record and sold an estimated amount of more than 6 million copies worldwide. Some of the most famous tracks are: “Sledgehammer”, “Red Rain”, “Don’t Give Up” and “In Your Eyes”. Eddie mentioned the album in an interview with Guitar Tricks Insider in 2016, as one of his favorites of all time.
“Red Rain” was especially one of his favorite songs of all time. He even presented that track to his song Wolfgang Van Halen when he was still a kid. Wolf recalled in a conversation with Classic Rock in 2022, the first time that his father showed him that Peter Gabriel song.
He continued:
“I’ll never forget him coming up to me one night with these huge headphones and going, ‘Wolf, put these one.’ He put the headphones on my head and cranked the first song ‘Red Rain’.”
“The soundscape of it is incredible. Everybody should do that at least once in their life. Put an amazing pair of headphones on and crank Red Rain. It’s very hard to listen to now that my father is gone. But that album front to back is Peter Gabriel at his finest,” Wolfgang Van Halen said.
Eddie Van Halen sadly passed away in 2020 at the age of 65, after years battling cancer. When his son Wolfgang got married in 2023, he chose the Peter Gabriel song “In Your Eyes” to be played during the ceremony because it was one of his father’s favorite ones.
That album was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1987. However, the winner that year was Paul Simon’s “Graceland”. Rolling Stone magazine included the album in their 2003 and 2020 editions of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
The big hit “Sledgehammer”, was promoted with an innovative animated music video. It was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and subsequently won a record of nine MTV Video Music Awards.
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