Sixteen years ago this week, my entire life changed forever.We were stationed on board Atsugi Naval Base in Japan. I was a Freshman in High School. Grunge was the big thing as far as music goes. I had just started easing into that scene. I was teaching English, and I was having fun doing it. Despite the alternative scene being at the height that it was, a band emerged to release their eleventh album. A band I first heard when I was four years old. A band that, up until this point, was known for their party music and their rocky relationships with lead singers over the years.
That band was Van Halen.
I was already a fan of Van Halen up to this point but this was something that came out of nowhere, not just because of the fact that Sammy Hagar and company were still making music. It was because of the fact that this time around, the band had strayed just a little bit from their party anthems, and as a result some strange shit was happening. They actually had a lot of meaningful stuff to say. The larger-than-life guitar riffs of Eddie Van Halen were still present, as they always were, but the focus was on songwriting this time around. I was already a fan of the band, and was not a fan of many other bands, really. The album was Balance, and it was released in January of 1995. And it was the CD's release date, that I ran out and picked up one of the first copies shipped. And it was that day that everything changed for me. I've said many times over the past few years that this CD pretty much became the soundtrack of my life, and that rings true even today, sixteen years later. Sammy Hagar's vocals were the best that I had ever heard a male singer ply his trade. Eddie was as on point as ever as well.
Balance was the first and only album I've ever owned that I could relate to, in some way or another, and reflected a lot of my past experiences. With songs like "The Seventh Seal" (about finding oneself), "Don't Tell Me" (an angry song about living your life the way you feel is best, no matter what), and "Take Me Back" (looking back on the good old days), it's hard to argue that point, at least for me it is. This CD spoke to me, pretty much looked into my soul, and expressed everything that I was feeling, not just back then, but even today as well. Hell, I listened to it for the first time in months last night at work, and on more than one occasion, I would hear the lyrics and think, "Shit, this sounds like something I would have written." The day I bought this album was the day that I first fell in love with something. That something was music. The night I finished listening to it, after the final note of the album's last song "Feelin'" echoed through my speakers, I decided that I wanted to enter the music industry. And then, ten months later, after attending a date on Van Halen's Balance tour, was when I realized that I wanted to be in a band of my own, write my own songs, and pretty much just rock.
Six months later I wrote my first set of lyrics on the school bus on the way home. I looked it over a few times the other night, and I asked myself, "A sixteen year old really wrote this? This is some deep shit." Ever since that first lyric I wrote, I haven't stopped writing. Hell, I probably have an entire career's worth of song lyrics tucked away in a briefcase my father gave me three years ago. I counted them the other night, and the tally came up to close to 180. That is between 1996 and now, to the present day. I have Van Halen's Balance to thank for that.
That album branched me off to other music genres as well. From classic rock to alternative. From alternative to heavy metal. From heavy metal to progressive, and to symphonic metal, and so on and so forth. It was that album that changed my outlook on things. It changed the way that I looked at life, the way I listened to music in general.
It was the album that changed my life forever.
