Billboard: Do you have synesthesia?
Eddie Van Halen: I think I read something about this. What is that, exactly?
Billboard: It’s the ability to see sound, which is supposedly why you call your guitar tone the “brown sound.” You supposedly see the color brown when you hear that specific tone.
Eddie Van Halen: That’s funny, because people took that whole “brown sound” thing totally out of context. I was never talking about my guitar tone. I was talking about [his brother and Van Halen bandmate] Alex’s snare drum. I’ve always thought Alex’s snare drum sounds like he’s beating on a log. It’s very organic. So it wasn’t my brown sound. It was Alex’s.
Billboard: Then how did this confusion happen?
Eddie Van Halen: It happened years ago. People would ask me about his drumming, and the only way I could explain it was that it had a very brown sound. I’m glad you brought this up, actually, so people can finally understand what I was talking about.
Billboard: But even so, you must realize that this was a weird way to describe a sound. You thought his drums sounded like a log, so you describe the color of the log itself? Why didn’t you say it was a wooden sound, or a log sound?
Eddie Van Halen: I don’t know. It’s an organic sound. Brown is an organic color.
Billboard: This makes me suspect you do have synesthesia. Does sound always have a color to you?
Eddie Van Halen: Alex’s snare drum does, definitely. Otherwise I wouldn’t have called it brown.
