Without You

Eddie used a quarter as a pick on this track, from the Van Halen III album, raking it back and forth across the strings to produce the effect heard in the intro. He later had some metal picks made up to use when playing the song live. Eddie used a prototype Wolfgang with P-90 pickups to record the song. This same guitar appeared in the video for the song.

The Without You video premiered on MTV's MTV Live at 6:00pm ET on Monday, 03/02/98. Segments of the video were filmed in Los Angeles on 01/29/98. The Ice Hotel was filmed in Sweden at the actual Ice Hotel. The Los Angeles soundstage was structured to look like the Ice Hotel with real ice. The ice was trucked in and kept at low temperatures during the shoot making some of the scenes very uncomfortable for the band. The total cost of the video was approximately $1 million. A short segment of the video went on to be used in the opening of VH1's Rock Show.

This was the first song from the Gary-era Van Halen to be aired on radio. It was first single to debut at #1 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Chart. It was also the first song written for the album. It was written on the day Gary and Eddie met.

Eddie wrote most of the lyrics to this song as nod to his new philosophies on life that began to take shape after he quit drinking. The song itself was written about 45 minutes after Gary first showed up at 5150. Eddie did the engineering and the final product heard on the album is actually the original demo of the song.