Alex Van Halen revealed the story behind the title to the recently released track “Unfinished”, the last song he wrote with his brother Edward.
“The name ‘Unfinished’ came from a song piece of music by Franz Schubert,” Alex told the audience during his appearance at the Robert Frost Auditorium in Culver City, CA on Thursday (Oct. 24). “He didn’t finish the song so there were several musicians or composers who finished the song for him.”
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) had many unfinished works during his time with his most famous being “Symphony No. 8”, known as “Unfinished”.
“And it was strange way of all these things coming together at one time,” continued Alex. “That song was my father’s favorite song. Either that or it was the only record he had [laughs]. It was ingrained in us from a very early time. An early, early state. So it all kind of came together and that’s why we named that last song Ed and I wrote together ‘Unfinished’, in honor of the lineage from my dad to Ed to me and to Wolf.”
Alex told host Ariel Levy (Alex’s collaborator on his new book Brothers) and the audience that he hopes to release more of Edward’s unfinished music.
“I have some music that was left behind,” said Alex. “I listen to it and I tell you, it tears my heart up. I can’t even verbalize it, but I am going to take some of that music and make something out of it [applause]. It was stuff that Ed had written and that we had worked on but, again, the most important thing is [that] I’m not going to try to pretend to be him or giving [it to] a guitarist to imitate him. I even tried AI to see the patterns of how he plays. You can’t do it. Ed was unique, he was individual, there’s only on Ed [applause].”
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