Sammy Hagar attends An Evening With Sammy Hagar at the GRAMMY Museum on November 19, 2019 in Los Angeles, California.
(Photo by Rebecca Sapp/Getty Images for The Recording Academy )
When 2020’s lockdown started many of us had aspirations of deep cleaning the house, watching that show you’ve been eyeing on Netflix, and starting new hobbies. For Lamont and Tonelli‘s Friday morning guest, Sammy Hagar, his 2020 was all about taking cover and making covers.
Lockdown did not slow down the “Hardest Working Man in Rock n’ Roll.” No, it only pushed him to find new creative outlets and his newest LP “Lockdown 2020” is filled with amazing covers of Van Halen, The Who, AC/DC, and even Bob Marley.
What’s even more incredible is that the band routed everything into their iPhones.
“Im not promoting [Apple] ,they’re not endorsing me, nothing. But they freakin sound pretty damn good,” said Hagar. “You put em’ on a stand in front of a drummer and he plays in a room to them. Turns on the video and man, you got a drum track and a video to go with it! And it’s free! It didn’t cost a damn thing.”
Hagar goes on to describe an acoustic session he recorded through the same process and he describes several microphones set up and ran into the phone. This has us believe iPhone isn’t doing all the heavy lifting but the ease in which the band could communicate through these sessions was critical to the remote sessions.
“It was so much fun. It made The Circle, it made our band stay together. I’m not sure we would have broken up, but we would have felt alienated.” said Hagar. “You feel like you’re in the studio. You’re making music. you’re talking about arrangements and you get excited talking about, ‘man, this sounds great! Can you believe it?'”
Listen to Part 2 of the interview below: