New Mammoth...

TLDR: I respect the hell out of the musicianship. Normies will have a few drinks and get down to this song.

Despite the silver spoon everyone gets hung up on he started touring at what, ~16? Every interview I’ve seen of Ed on Wolf he always talked up his skills. He’s got songs about Ed that are touching. There are some sick riffs in his work too. Heck even his EVH signature guitar is littered with tributes to Ed (and subtly). The songs not for everyone, but I can see “music enjoyers” getting down to it.

It’s not going to be the same as when VH came on the scene and everyone thought their sound systems were melting when Eruption started. I mean Sleep Token just sold out an arena tour - nuts, but I don’t see people remotely interested in the guitar work. Wolf has some of those EVH dna licks tucked away and people are going to think “wtf was that!” And dig through and discover VH for the first time - which is rad!
 
Wolf has some of those EVH dna licks tucked away and people are going to think “wtf was that!” And dig through and discover VH for the first time - which is rad!


is this whats really going to happen, or do we just want it to happen because its eddies kid and people are obsessed with eddie?? im not really sure people are gonna hear wvh and all of a sudden have an urge for diver down
 
Musical tastes are a personal thing. I get that a lot of people are not going to dig what Wolf is doing. With that said, let's not pretend that everything Eddie did was brilliant. There is a lot of garbage filler in the VH catalog. And I say that as a massive Van Halen fan.
 
I can understand if someone is hungry and needs to make it financially, writing music like this, but I’m always surprised when it’s done by someone with talent and fuck you money. This is so down the list on what I would want to play and play to, if I didn’t want to shoot myself at the end of the first tour.
Maybe he dug the big venues and that touring life when he was in VH and thought this crap was a shortcut to get back to that?
So horribly forgettable and disposable.
Music today follows a very predictably pattern that Ed wasn’t bound by. I think at heart both him and Alex were jazz players in a rock world. Their father was a jazz musician, they both played piano and had congenital exposure to both jazz and classical vocabulary (like Rick Beats son Dylan).
How many instrumentals does VH have that are just Ed/Al jamming? A bunch… The groove that the VH’s had together - that synergy was the big picture. Every song Ed wrote was a brilliant - on its own without lyrics. They’re not the same.
 
call me kooky - this is essentially what I loved in the 80's. Cheesey? Yup. Great tones and playing? Yes and yes! If it's butt rock, i'm here for it. don't care.
 
is this whats really going to happen, or do we just want it to happen because its eddies kid and people are obsessed with eddie?? im not really sure people are gonna hear wvh and all of a sudden have an urge for diver down
Haha yeah I think theres truth to both of those things. I do see more parents around my age (millennial) bringing their kids along to shows with some of the nu-metal and hard rock groups I grew up with, maybe that was the case further back too? I’m not a big VH fan either since I didn’t grow up with it so my perspective is more a products of whatever was going on at the time. I will say though since listening to some Mammoth it has made me go back to dig more into VH so I’m projecting from that perspective.
 
I get the biggest laugh reading shit like “writing for corporations”, as if that exists outside the pop music world where teams of people work on one song to intentionally make it as commercially viable as possible, using metrics and charts to dictate how long it should be and what age group to serve it to.

This vid is Devin Townsend speaking on Chad from Nickelback and how there’s this idea he’s intentionally writing songs to be radio hits, as Dev went to him when he wanted to write a pop album with the intent of reaching a wider audience.

Skip to 3:10 for the pertinent info, 3:35 is the most pertinent-


It’s just as obvious to me that Wolfgang writes what he wants to hear as it is obvious to me those assuming his motivations have never actually written a song of their own. The dude’s a huge fan of Foo Fighers and Alter Bridge, of course his music is going to be adjacent to that stuff.

All my favorite bands have big, catchy choruses; AIC, Pantera, Mastodon, Tool, Van Halen, etc, if I do my best to throw a catchy chorus into a song, am I writing in hopes to get airplay, or just taking what my biggest influences did and doing my version of that? No one but me knows the reasons I write what I write and I barely even know the reasons because I don’t question it, I just write what I hear in my head and hope I want to listen to it after. It’s hard enough getting past the hurdle of “Everything I’m coming up with sucks”, never mind trying to dictate that into what you think other people are going to like.

And just having money in the family does not mean the dude had an easy life. No one growing up with an alcoholic/addict for a parent has it easy. Never mind having a fucking legend for a father. There’s ample celebrity kids out there with addicted parents, but how many can say “My dad completely revolutionized ______”? No one off the top of my head. That’s surely a lonely club and for every time someone told him “It must be awesome having EVH as your dad!” he probably had a handful of recent stories about why it wasn’t awesome having EVH as a dad. By Ed’s own words he struggled with sobriety the entirety of Wolf’s childhood and as soon as he got sober he was dealing with the cancer shit. There likely weren’t many days Wolf wasn’t concerned about him from the time he was old enough to realize what was going on until the day he died. I don’t see anything easy about that.
 
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