Heart's Nancy Wilson released an instrumental guitar piece honoring her late friend Eddie Van Halen.

The brief "4 Edward" flows through pinging acoustic harmonics and rumbling, palm-muted chords. The track appears on her upcoming debut solo LP, You and Me, out May 7.

"When Heart toured with Van Halen, I asked Eddie why he never played acoustic guitar," Wilson said in a statement. "His response [was], ‘I don’t have one.' I gave Eddie one of mine, and he immediately wrote a song on it that stole my heart. After he passed, it hit me so hard [that] I felt it was time to pay tribute to him."

You can hear the track below.

Wilson elaborated on that story in a recent interview with Hawaii Public Radio, detailing a tour between Heart and Van Halen. "Early the next morning [after receiving the instrument], in the hotel, back when people would ring your room, he rang my room and he played for me this beautiful piece of acoustic guitar instrumental music on the phone," she said. "I was so touched, and it was so beautiful, it was one of the prettiest things I'd ever heard."

In the same interview, the Heart member recalled some behind-the-scenes antics of traveling with the hard-rock band.

"There were those days where you'd go down to the bar," she said. "The Van Halen brothers, they won the prize of just how to be totally raucous and totally out of control and drunk. They'd just be yelling and cavorting all over the room and all over each other, and fisticuffs would bust out, and then, two seconds later, they'd be hugging: 'I love you, man.' They were out of control. They were the first ones to ever introduce us to the kamikaze — the vodka with lime or whatever."

Wilson previously issued her new LP's title cut (a tribute to her mother, Lois) and a cover of Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising." The track listing, featuring guest spots from Duff McKagan and Foo Fighters' Taylor Hawkins, also includes versions of Pearl Jam’s “Daughter,” the Cranberries' “Dreams” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer."

 

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