Balance (Van Halen album)

Recording and production

According to Ian Christe's book, Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga, Balance was Van Halen’s tenth album and was released amid internal fighting between Sammy Hagar and Eddie and Alex Van Halen. The band worked eight-hour days for three weeks recording the album. The first song on the record, "The Seventh Seal", features mystical overtones that came, in part, from Eddie’s newfound sobriety. His therapist, Sat-Kaur Khalsa, urged him to relax and imagine where he was after drinking a six-pack of beer. After smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and playing guitar for twenty years, he tried writing songs sober and wrote three songs in one half hour period. The album then moves into Sammy’s territory with "Can’t Stop Lovin’ You". This song was taken from his ex-wife’s point of view, believing that she was still in love with him. The band saw more success with its hard rock genre as seen in the album’s song, "Aftershock". The album reached number 1; their fourth consecutive number one studio album.

Most of the Balance album was recorded at Eddie Van Halen's 5150 Studios, located in Studio City, except for five lead vocal tracks which were recorded in Vancouver, where the album's producer Bruce Fairbairn resided. It was mixed by Mike Fraser and mastered at Sterling Sound, New York, by George Marino.

Following the recording of Balance and its subsequent Ambulance Tour (the band renamed the "balance" tour to the "ambulance tour" because Eddie was having hip issues and brother Alex had to wear a neck brace ), Van Halen's second incarnation broke up. Regarding this time period, in 1997, Eddie Van Halen told Guitar World: "There had been a variety of conflicts brewing between manager Ray Danniels Sammy and the band since I quit drinking on October 2, 1994... It got so bad that I actually started drinking again."

Selected song details

"The Seventh Seal" kicks off the album. Complete with chanting monks and dangling metal bells, the song unveiled a vast, open, U2-like guitar wall that propelled through the darkest terrain the band ever tackled. As a side note Eddie revealed in 2012 that "The Seventh Seal" was written before Van Halen became a band.

"Amsterdam" was written about the capital city of Eddie and Alex Van Halen's country of birth; their actual birthplace being the town of Nijmegen, further to the east. Eddie is on record in Guitar World as saying, "I always hated the words to 'Wham, Bam Amsterdam', from Balance, because they were all about smoking pot. They were just stupid. Lyrics should plant some sort of seed for thought, or at least be a little more metamorphical."

During The Balance tour show in Pensacola, Florida, Hagar stated that "Take Me Back (Déjà Vu)" was "a true story". The song itself features a then almost 20-year-old riff Eddie had previously used on a song entitled "No More Waiting" which the band played on occasion in the pre-Van Halen I era.

Artwork

The original title of the album was The Seventh Seal, to which photographer Glen Wexler created some concepts, including one with an androgynous four-year-old boy. Eventually they picked Balance, which Alex explained to Wexler was about the turmoil and changes surrounding Van Halen, including the recent death of long-time manager Ed Leffler. Alex asked something "exploring the duality of the human psyche". Wexler then sketched new concepts, with the band liking the one with conjoined twins on a see-saw. Said androgynous boy, who actually hailed from Denver but fans mistakenly considered to be Eddie's son Wolfgang Van Halen, was then photographed in Wexler's Hollywood studio, with Wexler's daughter being the hand model which pulled his hair. The images were combined with a miniature landscape for the background using Corel Painter. Wexler detailed that the Balance cover had a number of ironies: "the impossibility of the conjoined twins actually playing on the seesaw; the 'calm' twin actually being the aggressive one, pulling the hair of his sibling to create the appearance of an aggressive child; and having no one else to play with in a desolate post-apocalyptic setting, in which unusable playground equipment is the only object in sight." He added that the twins were “designed” to mimic the shape of the “VH” logo. An alternate cover was used for the Japanese release, citing a cultural offense to the original version. The cover boy is not —the original boy was from Denver. On the inside, the compact disc shows the Leonardo da Vinci drawing Vitruvian Man, and the back of the booklet shows an egg sitting on a guitar.

Release and promotion

Balance was released January 24, 1995 and is the first release by a platinum-certified act on Warner Bros. since Danny Goldberg stepped in as chairman/CEO. It's also the band's first album since the loss of their longtime manager Ed Leffler, who died of thyroid cancer on October 16, 1993, before Ray Danniels took over management of the band (mostly due to Alex's personal relationship with Danniels as brother-in-law). Warner Bros. said that early 1995 would be the right time to unleash a new Van Halen album. "It seems like we've always had success with big acts right after the first of the year," says Warner Bros. VP of merchandising and advertising Jim Wagner. "Don't Tell Me (What Love Can Do)," the first single from Balance, was shipped to top 40 and album rock radio on December 28, 1994. Van Halen takes the honor of being the first act to debut at No. 1 in 1995, as their weekly sales of 295,000 units earns Balance the Billboard 200 crown. The opening-week tally for Van Halen's Balance is 21% higher than that of For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, the band's previous studio album, which topped the chart with 243,000 units in the summer of 1991.

Two concerts during the Balance tour were filmed and aired as a pay-per-view event at the Molson Ampitheatre in Toronto Canada on August 18th and 19th. There was talk of releasing a live DVD of the performances, which found the band to be at their peak during the tour, however the release of the DVD never materialized, however most of it can be viewed on Youtube

Track listing

All songs by Eddie Van Halen, Michael Anthony, Sammy Hagar and Alex Van Halen.

The album was also released on vinyl and excludes "Baluchitherium" due to time constraints and has a slightly altered track order. The Japanese bonus track "Crossing Over" was used as the B-side to the US CD single for "Can't Stop Lovin' You".

Van Halen

Additional personnel

Production