Alex Van Halen says the title of the last song he recorded with his late brother Eddie, the instrumental “Unfinished,” came from “a song piece of music” by the late composer Franz Schubert known as “Unfinished.”
Speaking last week in Culver City, California in support of his just published memoir, Brothers, he said, “[Franz] didn’t finish the song so there were several musicians or composers who finished the song for him.
“And it was a strange way of all these things coming together at one time. That song was my father’s favorite song. Either that it was only the record he had [laughs]. It was ingrained in us from a very early time. An early, early slate. So it all kind of came together and that’s why we named that last song Ed and I wrote together ‘Unfinished,’ in honor of the lineage from my dad to Ed to me and to Wolf[gang Van Halen, Eddie’s son].”
Asked if there is more music to come, Alex said there is. “I listen to it and I tell you, it tears my heart up. I can’t even verbalize it, but I am going to take some of that music and make something of it. It was stuff that Ed had written and that we had worked on but, again, the most important thing is [that] I’m not going to try to pretend to be him or giving [it to] a guitarist to imitate him. I even tried Artificial Intelligence to see the patterns of how he plays. You can’t do it. Ed was unique, he was individual, there’s only one Ed.”
“Unfinished” is featured in the audiobook version of Brothers, and it’s also available for downloading or streaming on the band’s website, Van-Halen.com.
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