Ain’t nothin’ like it. Like a shiny machine. It’s Eddie Van Halen’s isolated guitar track from “Panama”!
The YouTube channel Isolated Tracks has shared the audio of the track above, which comes from the 2015 remastered version of the 1984 album. The isolation of Eddie’s parts highlights his brilliance in places we may not have even noticed before. From the riff to the rhythm parts, to the iconic solo and all of the nuances along the way – it’s all Ed.
Eddie said he wrote the riff to “Panama” after his bandmates asked him to write something with an AC/DC beat adding, “It really doesn’t sound that much like AC/DC but that was my interpretation of it.”
As for that classic solo: “I view solos as a song within a song. From day one that is just the way that I write things. I always start with some intro or theme and establish a riff, then after the solo there’s some kind of breakdown section. That’s there in almost every song, or else it returns to the intro.”
Main Photo Credit: Rudy Childs