Why Can't This Be Love

"Why Can't This Be Love" is Van Halen after Eddie Van Halen fell in love with synthesizers, and the result is a song that sounds genuinely joyful about its own excess. The keyboard riff that opens the track is bright and propulsive, more Sunset Strip than progressive rock, and the production has a particular mid-eighties sheen — compressed, sparkly, everything slightly too loud in the best possible way. Sammy Hagar's voice is a clarion instrument, warmer and more conventionally melodic than David Lee Roth's, and he deploys it here with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what the song needs: sincerity without self-consciousness. The guitars don't disappear — Eddie's playing is everywhere, punctuating and weaving — but they share space with the keyboards rather than dominating. The lyrical premise is a person arguing with themselves about whether what they're feeling qualifies as real love, and Hagar plays that internal negotiation as celebration rather than doubt. This is summer afternoon music, windows-down-on-the-freeway music, music for the moment when you realize you've been happy for several hours without noticing. It belongs to a very specific strain of American optimism that the mid-eighties produced in abundance and that now reads as both dated and strangely moving.