OU812
| OU812 | |||||
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| Studio album by Van Halen | |||||
| Released | May 24, 1988 | ||||
| Recorded | September 1987 – April 1988 | ||||
| Studio | 5150 Studios, Studio City, CA | ||||
| Genre | Hard rock | ||||
| Length | 50:09 | ||||
| Label | Warner Bros. | ||||
| Producer | Van Halen, Donn Landee | ||||
| Van Halen chronology | |||||
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| Sammy Hagar chronology | |||||
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| Singles from OU812 | |||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |    |
| Robert Christgau | C |
| Rolling Stone | |
| Ultimate Guitar | |
OU812 (pronounced "Oh You Ate One Too") is the eighth studio album by American hard rock band Van Halen, released in 1988, and the second to feature vocalist Sammy Hagar. Van Halen started work on the album in September 1987 and completed it in April 1988, just one month before its release.
Once the tour for 5150 was over, Eddie Van Halen had some riffs he had been working on and Sammy Hagar "had a bunch of lyrics in notebooks that I had been thinking about and writing", so they decided to work on another album soon. Van Halen for the first time did not work with producer Ted Templeman, but retained Templeman's engineer, Donn Landee. While the album acknowledges Van Halen for writing and performing and Landee for recording, there was no production credit because according to Hagar, "the band pretty much produced the album ourselves. And we weren't producers, in the sense that we went in with an idea and told everybody what to do and took control. There just wasn't a producer." The only cover version on the album, of Little Feat's "A Apolitical Blues", was coincidentally also done by Templeman and Landee, to the point the engineer used the same setup to record Van Halen's version.
When Hagar was brought to the studio, Eddie showed a piano and drums demo he recorded with Alex Van Halen, which the band soon developed into the song "When It's Love". Given the musical parts were finished quicker than the lyrics, Hagar took some weeks off and travelled to his Mexican house at Cabo San Lucas to work on more songs. There he found the inspiration for the song "Cabo Wabo", which borrowed the melody of "Make It Last", a song Hagar composed for his previous band Montrose, and whose title later named Hagar's nightclub in the city. The last song to be developed was "Finish What Ya Started", which Eddie and Hagar composed one night late into the production. However, the last track to which Hagar recorded his vocals was the eventual album opener "Mine All Mine", as he felt unsure about the lyrics. The deeper metaphysical lyrics to "Mine All Mine" were rewritten seven times, with Hagar saying "it was the first time in my life I ever beat myself up, hurt myself, punished myself, practically threw things through windows, trying to write the lyrics." Although it was considered a joke song, "Source of Infection" was written about Eddie's hospitalization with dengue fever during his vacation in Australia in April 1988, celebrating his seventh wedding anniversary with Valerie Bertinelli.
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Wikipedia