Rarely is it an easy road treading the same ground as a parent in music, but perhaps never more so when your father was the frontman for a legendary band that also experienced more than its fair share of drama. Still, Andrew Hagar is intent on pursuing the dream as a singer and musician, following in the footsteps of his father Sammy.
“It’s a blessing and a curse,” Andrew tells Metal Edge. “I mean, I’m really thankful for the extra attention that I get from some stuff for my music and my art, but a lot of the other stuff that comes along with it can be a little hard to navigate sometimes.”
When he first began to wade into musical waters, around 2012, Hagar didn’t use his birth name, nor did he tell anyone who he was. Even friends and bandmates in his punk-rock endeavors – this is pre-social media – weren’t aware his father was the Red Rocker. That’s changed in a big way this year, as he recently appeared alongside Sammy on the Paramount+ show Family Legacy, which features interviews with children of legendary musicians. He’s also put forth a more straightforward rock sound with the recent singles “Red Light Appetite” and “Systematic Minds” under his own name.
Metal Edge caught up with Andrew to talk about his own musical legacy, the dangers of AI, his involvement in mental health awareness and how he viewed some of the spectacle within Van Halen from a front row seat.
How cognizant of what comes with the Hagar name were you when you first started to use it professionally?
Andrew Hagar: I actually didn’t start releasing music under my own name until, I think, 2019 and 2020; I started music a little later than a lot of people, and I’d started releasing music much later than a lot of other whatever, “second gen” and stuff. So, I just wanted to make sure that while I was growing as a musician and really determining what my sound was and what my musical identity was, I didn’t want to put the extra pressure on myself having all these other people’s expectations lumped on me and being under the microscope while I was developing as an artist. I’m still developing as an artist. I’m still experimenting with different sounds and different production vibes and stuff like that, but I feel like now I’m much more fully formed as a human being and as an artist, and I’m okay with releasing stuff under my own name.
I think that there comes a little bit of social responsibility with using my own name, because there are a lot of people who…
Click here to read my full interview with Andrew Hagar over at Metal Edge.
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