Alex Van Halen Audiobook Features Last Song He Worked On With Eddie Van Halen
Alex Van Halen is releasing his memoir, Brothers, on October 22, and the audiobook version contains a very special piece of music.
Per Van-Halen.com and Ultimate Classic Rock, the audiobook version of Brothers features an unreleased track titled “Unfinished.” The song is the last piece of music Alex wrote with Eddie Van Halen, and the song can be heard throughout the audiobook recording, which Alex is narrating.
As previously reported, Brothers is 384 pages, and the audiobook is 720 minutes. The book will delve into the story of Alex and Eddie Van Halen. Detailed in the book will be their story of immigrating to the United States from the Netherlands as children. It will also touch on Alex and Eddie’s mother and father.
As with any rock and roll memoir, plenty will be discussed about the wild times of the band Van Halen. However, the book will be ” … a story of brotherhood, music, and enduring love.”
Alex Van Halen is quoted in the official blurb saying, in part, ” … We shared the experience of coming to this country and figuring out how to fit in … Later, we shared the back of a tour bus, alcoholism, the experience of becoming famous, of becoming fathers and uncles, and of spending more hours in the studio than I’ve spent doing anything else in this life.”
Brothers is currently available for pre-order at HarperCollins.com, and the audiobook version is available fr pre-order at Amazon.
Van Halen: An American Story
AVH’s memoir won’t be the first time we’ve heard about the uniquely American story of Van Halen.
Eddie Van Halen touched on that experience in February 2015 when he took part in the Smithsonian series “What It Means To Be American.” He sat down for a nearly hour-long interview in front of a small crowd discussing his immigrant experience. He also talked about the obstacles he and his brother had to overcome. EVH noted his family came to America with “$50 and a piano.”
Before coming to America, the Van Halen brothers dealt with their share of discrimination in the Netherlands. Their father was Dutch, and their mother was of Indonesian descent. Things didn’t get much better in America. Neither Eddie nor Alex could speak English at first, which made going to school in America very challenging.
“We already went through that in Holland, you know, first day, first grade. Now, you’re in a whole other country where you can’t speak the language, and you know absolutely nothing about anything, and it was beyond frightening,” recalled EVH in the Smithsonian interview. Eddie said that even though they definitely faced adversity, he thought their experience made him and Alex stronger ” … because you had to be.”
