Credit: Jeremy DangerHeart‘s Nancy Wilson is planning to release her first solo studio album in April, and she tells ABC Audio that the record will include a short acoustic instrumental she wrote recently as a tribute to the late Eddie Van Halen.
Wilson explains the song, which is titled “4 Edward,” was inspired by an incident that happened decades ago when Heart and Van Halen were touring together.
Nancy recalls that one night, Eddie had complimented her acoustic playing, and when she asked him if he ever played acoustic guitar, she was surprised to find out he didn’t own one.
“I’m like, ‘You can’t be serious. You’ve got to have one,'” she remembers telling him. “[So] I handed him one…out of [my] guitar vaults.”
Wilson says that the next morning, at “the crack of dawn,” Eddie phoned her at her hotel and proceeded to play her a song he’d written on the guitar she gave him as a gift.
She describes the tune as a “beautiful instrumental…that was so unbelievably symmetrically kind of classical, and then [featured] kind of a rock part, and then another beautiful…melodic major key [part].”
Nancy then explains, “So I thought, because he recently had…passed away, and the world lost such an innovator and such a great gift of a musician…I would do a tribute to him…and write like a short…minute-and-a-half instrumental on acoustic for him.”
Wilson tells ABC Audio that as a launching point, she tried to remember the song Van Halen had played over the phone for her all those years ago.
Nancy says “4 Edward” was “the last thing I recorded for the album,” noting that she worked hard putting it together because she wanted it to be a worthy tribute to Eddie.
By Matt Friedlander
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.