Sammy Hagar isn’t slowing down.
The rock icon — who turned 78 on Monday — recently came off a major tour, has an upcoming residency in Las Vegas and just released a new live album.
Hagar told Fox News Digital he decided to do the live album now because his band had the chance to do nine shows at Sin City’s Park MGM theater last summer, and “not have to pack up and reset up every night.”
He explained that the band recorded all 33 shows on its “The Best of All Worlds” tour last summer, and they ended up putting the album together from a couple of different nights.
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“The last two nights, we just started having so much fun, and we switched so many songs around that just, they were magic again, you know?” he told Fox News Digital. “And that’s what you want from a live album. You want magic. You know, you can’t play the songs better than the original recordings, but they can have more energy and more life because of the audience.”
The “I Can’t Drive 55” singer bragged that his audience is “great every night” and, no matter where he performs, it always seems like the same excited crowd.
Hagar said he cares more about making the fans happy “than I care about myself.”
“I’ve been so tired before and exhausted on tours and where I didn’t even want to walk out on stage, and then I get out there and the fans, you know, rejuvenate you instantly,” he explained.
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He said he even performs so hard sometimes he feels like he’s going to collapse, but he pushes through “because I care about the fans.”
The “There’s Only One Way to Rock” singer also knows he’s lucky to have a successful career that’s lasted for more than half a century.
“I’m so fortunate to be in the position I’m in in my life now, and have been in this position since I was in the 70s,” he said, joking that he meant the 1970s, not his age.
The former Van Halen frontman continued, “Since then, I’ve been the most fortunate guy in the world. Everything I’ve done has been successful, and I gotta say I’m so lucky, I would never take that for granted.”
Hagar said he feels like he owes every person in his audience or person who goes to one of his restaurants. “And if I ever see them, I owe them the time of day. I stop, I will take a picture, I will shake your hand, I will sign something, you know, it’s just it’s my job.”
When asked how he keeps working harder than ever at his age, Hagar joked, “It’s not work. If it was work, I might have a different opinion.”
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He said touring feels like work, but the fans’ energy pushed him through last summer “because I was walking out in front of 18, 20,000 people every night and going ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe these people are still wanting to, you know, hear my music and see what I bring, and that was such an uplifting thing in itself.”
Because he wasn’t sure he wanted to go through a major tour again, the Las Vegas residency felt like a “dream come true” with a nice hotel room, not having to check out and jump on a plane every morning, then drive for hours to another hotel room.
“That’s on the road,” he said. “That, I don’t think I would be so driven to keep doing this if I had to keep doing that. So, the residency is so easy. I gotta tell you, all you got to do is walk out there in a beautiful room and do your thing and then that’s the easiest part of my job is doing that, you know? Once I get on stage, I know what to do.”
Hagar is also working with Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger on a song he wrote that was inspired by Hagar.
“He said he wrote it thinking about me, channeling how I write uplifting songs,” Hagar said of Kroeger.
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Kroeger told Hagar that he felt the song sounded like him, and he showed Hagar what he was imagining by playing an AI version of him singing.
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“He goes ‘So, I did my vocals and I made it, I took AI and used your voice. I made AI sing [Hagar’s] part, and see what it would sound like with you singing this song, and he says it sounded amazing.”
Hagar joked that the AI version of him might even sound better than his real voice, but he went into the studio to record it with Tommy Lee on the drums for the song, “and it blew up.”
“Who knows from that,” he said. “I don’t know what Chad’s going to do. He’s such a great songwriter, and he’s just such an open-minded, intelligent guy, you know, and so we’ll see what happens with it.”
Hagar also reflected on losing Ozzy Osbourne over the summer, saying he was so “impressed and amazed” that the late rocker was able to perform at his farewell concert just days before he died.
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“All my friends, we would talk about it all the time. ‘You think Ozzy’s gonna make it?’ None of us would have bet that Ozzy was gonna make it to that show, but we knew the show would go on, the tribute. We thought this is gonna end up being a great tribute, and we’ll all end up singing with Black Sabbath, you know, or whatever,” he said.
He continued, “And he did it. He did, and he did it great. And it was amazing what he did. It just broke my heart that he did it, and then when he died it made me realize two weeks later … how amazing it really was.”
Osbourne performed his final “Back to the Beginning” concert in Birmingham, England, on July 5. He died 17 days later on July 22.
Hagar said the reality of Osbourne’s death took his performance “from amazing to unbelievable to impossible, raising the bar so high for any of us that plan on having any kind of a going out some kind of crazy way. You’re not gonna top Ozzy. He did it.”
He said he still gets goosebumps from head to toe thinking about it.
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“What a rock and roll — what a master. He’s the master, period,” he added.
The live album “Sammy Hagar & The Best of All Worlds Band: The Residency” was released on Friday. His Park MGM “The Best of All Worlds” residency in Las Vegas will be on select dates in March and September of next year.
