Wolfgang Van Halen Says Fronting Mammoth WVH Is ‘Unnatural’
Wolfgang Van Halen admitted he felt “unnatural” fronting his band Mammoth WVH, but that he kept doing it for an important reason.
The comments came during a recent interview with Loudwire (video below).
“With Van Halen, everybody was there to look at Eddie Van Halen and look at David Lee Roth, so I could just kind of do my thing… fly under the radar and be comfortable,” Wolfgang explained, alluding to the time he spent touring with his father's famous band. “But now I’m the dude that everybody’s looking at; and that is so unnatural and doesn't match up with my personality type whatsoever.” “But I love and care about the music so much that I made, that you just kind of step up for the moment and just go for it," he continued. "It’s just a part of the job.”
Van Halen went on to note that audience size doesn’t matter much to him. “I like any venue where people are there to have a good time,” he explained. “It could be two people, it could be 200 people, it could be 200,000 people – never played for that many people before. But as long as people are there to just have a good time and not sit there with their arms folded like you're doing something to piss them off, I don't think it can get any better than that.”
The rocker's debut release “Distance” -- a tribute to his late father -- hit No. 1 on the Billboard rock chart and earned the musician a Grammy nomination. However, Van Halen said that the success of his second single, “Don’t Back Down” was the true “turning point” in his mind. “Plenty of people did argue that it was a fluke that 'Distance' did really well,” he recalled. “But it was the fact that ‘Don’t Back Down’ actually went No. 1 is proof that, hey, maybe what I’m doing isn’t so bad.”
Watch Wolfgang Van Halen’s Interview with Loudwire