Van Halen 3 - Album Review

Van Halen 3 is probably the most underrated and misunderstood album of the Van Halen series. The entire album had it’s own identity amongst everything else Van Halen has ever created. This was created at a time in which Eddie Van Halen was out among other bands helping them on various songs in their own albums, such as Rich Wyman’s “Fatherless Child” album and the “Legend of 1900” movie soundtrack album. Eddie said he wanted to make changes to the group, to be more different than they already are. Gary Cherone’s entry to the band changed it up, but did not complete Eddie’s vision of change. This album almost seems like he went almost into a perfectionist mode whilst creating the album, and it was an odd feeling, but also kind of fun.

The album starts off with the song “Neworld”. With it’s beautiful acoustic feel, this instrumental song sets the mood at the beginning of the album.This is, surprisingly, the first ever song that Eddie hadn’t played piano for a Van Halen song. The piano was actually played by Mike Post, the owner of the studio where they recorded the song. The song itself is very short, at only 1:46.

“Without You” was written and recorded in one take on the day Eddie and Gary met. The lyrics of the song are based off of poetry that Gary brought with him to go meet Eddie for the first time. He found it intriguing and decided to make it into a song. In my opinion this song is the one that the band performed best when live.

The third song on the album is quite unique, and is called “One I Want”. If you’ve ever listened to the song “Dreams” (also by Van Halen), when the keyboard of that song is played on a guitar, it is almost identical to the guitar line of “One I Want”.

The fourth song “From Afar” was Gary Cherone’s attempt to isolate himself from the past singers that were a part of Van Halen. The lyrics were quite different from anything Roth or Hagar would have written.


“Dirty Water Dog” was actually named after a weird habit that the band got into, which is going and buying water already boiled: “Dirty Water Dogging”. Eddie does I nice job of keeping perfectly on beat throughout the song.