“I’m almost embarrassed to talk about this… I had a dream and Eddie came to the dream and showed me a song. This was one hundred percent a communication from the beyond. There is no question about it.”
Sammy Hagar’s new song “Encore, Thank You, Goodnight” is released today. The Lyric Video is embedded below.
“I can’t wait for the world to hear this very special song Joe and I wrote as a long overdue thank you to Eddie Van Halen for the music, the good times, and the dream that inspired this track, ‘Encore, Thank You, Goodnight.'” – Sammy
The track was inspired by a dream and brought to reality through introspective lyrics, powerful chords and rhythmic guitar and drums with some help from Joe Satriani, Michael Anthony and Kenny Aronoff.
This is a one-off, not part of any upcoming album, developed for this band and their upcoming Las Vegas residency.
Hagar tells Review Journal, “It came from a dream, which is really unusual, and I said to Joe, ‘What would Eddie have done if we’d have finished this song in my dream?’ And he came up with stuff that just blows my mind. Everybody I played it for, and everybody that hears it just goes, ‘Holy (expletive).’ You get all goose-bumpy. Get a box of Kleenex. If you don’t cry, then you’ve never loved Van Halen.”
About a year after Eddie Van Halen died in 2020, Sammy Hagar had a dream that they were sharing a chill moment together. “He had a guitar around his neck and we were having a love fest since we hadn’t seen each other in a long time,” Hagar tells Rolling Stone. “And he just started playing this riff, and I started singing.”
It took several years, but Hagar ultimately finished the song, which he wound up calling “Encore, Thank You, Goodnight,” with help from guitarist Joe Satriani, Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony, and drummer Kenny Aronoff. The video will premiere April 27 when Hagar performs at Stagecoach, and he’ll play it live for the first time at the kickoff to his ‘Best of All Worlds’ Las Vegas residency on April 30. But you can hear it right now.
To Hagar, the dream wasn’t merely an amalgamation of Eddie Van Halen memories seeping out of his subconsciousness. “This was one hundred percent a communication from the beyond,” he says. “There is no question about it. I dream about Eddie all the time, quite honestly.”
Each time, the dream ends immediately once Hagar realizes that the guitarist has died. This time, he says, he woke up so quickly that he remembered the song they were working on in great detail. “I just grabbed a pad and a pencil,” he said. “And I got my iPhone, my wife’s screaming, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Writing a song!’ It just kept coming and coming. When I got up the next day, I grabbed my guitar and started to figure out the chords.”
For two years, the song remained little more than a rough iPhone recording, some scribbles, and a vivid memory of a dream. But earlier this year, he decided it was time to finish it with help from Satriani. “I thought, ‘I’ll never write a song with Eddie again. This is the closest I can come to it,'” Hagar says. “When I told Joe about the dream and played him the thing he went, ‘Oh man. Hell yeah. Let’s finish that. That’s a cool song.'”
The lyrics (“Thank you for the music/Thank you for the songs/Thank you for the visit, what took so long?”) express gratitude toward Eddie, and the many good years they shared together. Hagar had no doubt that Satriani was the right guitarist for the recording after spending the past year playing Van Halen songs with him all across North America. “Joe’s a scholar,” says Hagar. “He knew Eddie’s guitar solos and his chord structures inside and out. And so he tried to bring in some of those classic Eddie-style parts.”
“I can’t wait to play it live.”
Sammy Hagar: Vocals
Joe Satriani: Guitars
Michael Anthony: Bass, Vocals
Kenny Aronoff: Drums
Eric Caudiex: Keyboards
The Full Music Video premieres Sunday at 9:00PM PT. Watch it on VHND here.