In a recent conversation with “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk”, Sammy Hagar opened up about “The Best Of All Worlds” tour that kicked off on July 13 at iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach, Florida.

More, the singer discussed Joe Satriani’s performance of the Van Halen songs written by the late guitarist, Eddie Van Halen:

“Oh, I gotta tell you, Joe is a scholar. I can’t tell you how good of a musician Joe Satriani is. He’s as good as any musician on the planet. He’s got his own style. It’s a little different than Eddie’s. Eddie was a genius musician too, but he had a different style and he had his thing. Joe’s got his thing. Joe went in the closet.

”Well, not in the closet, he went into the woodshed, and since the announcement (of the tour on ‘The Howard Stern Show’ last November)… I threw a couple (of) songs at him and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you just learn this song or that song?’ And then Stern laid songs on us, that we’re going, ‘Well, shoot, we didn’t think about those. Joe, do you know that one?’ He goes, ‘Oh, I’ll try it.’ He’s that good. So now he’s dialed them in.

“What Joe has done, for any of you guitar players out there that wanna come and see what Joe’s doing, or wanna criticize Joe or wanna praise Joe, whatever you want to do, he has taken the essence of Eddie’s guitar solos and parts and he plays the necessary parts to make sure it sounds just like the record, the way it’s supposed to. The solo on a song like ‘Jump’, I hate to use that one ’cause it’s not my song, but we do ‘Jump’; we do a piece of ‘Jump’ on the encore. We do a five-song encore that’s got a little bit of ‘Jump’ in it.

”And when he plays that solo, he plays it like the record. And then he’ll go off in the middle somewhere. He’ll do a little tiny thing. He’ll do little things that says, ‘No, this is Joe Satriani playing Eddie,’ but he’s doing Eddie right. No one could complain. He’s hitting all the right notes that make the essence of what Eddie invented.

”And he puts his own heart and soul into it, which makes it so much different and so much better, in my opinion, than a guy just mimicking him exactly. And his tone is different. It’s kind of like Eddie’s, but I don’t know, Joe’s just so good. I don’t know how he’s doing this. I really don’t know how he’s doing this.”