Actually, if I could deliberately sit down and write a pop hit, all my songs would be pop hits! Let’s put it this way. I play what I like to hear. And sometimes I like...

The only band I was really over-into was Cream. And the only thing I really liked about them was their live stuff ’cause they played two verses, then go off and jam for 20 minutes,...

Music is for people. The word ‘pop’ is simply short for popular. It means that people like it. I’m just a normal jerk who happens to make music. As long as my brain and fingers...

Imagine if Beethoven had a tape recorder. Then you’d know exactly what he meant. Maybe he meant ‘Da da da da’ instead of ‘Boom boom boom boom!’ Who knows?

I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland.

I started doing all kinds of weird stuff on the guitar, which became part of my playing. I started doing harmonics and tapping on the guitar and pulling off strings and doing all this weird...

Before the operation on my left hand I wasn’t able to stretch my fingers open all the way. I’ve never had very big hands, but I could do the splits with them. Eventually I couldn’t...

And if I would have taken lessons I probably wouldn’t have done it, and what forced me to do all this weird stuff on the guitar was I couldn’t afford effects pedals, I didn’t have...

David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C’mon – Van Halen doing ‘Dancing in the Streets’? It was stupid. I started feeling like I...

When Van Halen started out, there was no path to fame. We just played what we liked. Even today it always comes down to the simplicity of rock and roll.

When I’m home on a break, I lock myself in my room and play guitar. After two or three hours, I start getting into this total meditation. It’s a feeling few people experience, and that’s...

A good producer brings out the best in the artist he’s working with. You shouldn’t be able to listen to something and say, ‘So-and-so produced this album.’

‘For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge’ took a year to record; that’s why the playing on it might sound somewhat labored. ‘Balance,’ on the other hand, was written and recorded in only four months, so the whole...