Humans Being

This song (a rocker) was contracted for the soundtrack for the movie Twister by Van Halen. The band was supposed to have the first half of 1996 off. In that time, Eddie Van Halen was going to have hip surgery, his brother Alex was going to get his neck fixed, and Sammy Hagar's wife was preparing to have their first child. They were convinced by their manager, Ray Danniels, that this movie was huge and the money would carry them for he remainder of 1996. Danniels was right: Twister made $494 million in worldwide box office.

Hagar had written a song called "The Silent Extreme," which Alex later renamed "Humans Being." There was a lot of friction between Sammy and the band because Sammy was in Maui with his pregnant wife and the others wanted him to fly to the studio and finish the song. Eddie pleaded with Sammy and said they needed only a minute and a half of lyrics added and he suggested "Bah, bah, bah. I hate this, I hate that, you dirty rat." Sammy said "that sucked." Sammy finally said okay, and came up with this line: "There is just enough Christ in me/To make me feel almost guilty/Is that why God made us breed/To make us see we're humans being." Sammy sang the song in three parts in about an hour and a half and split. This played a key roll in the end of the relationship between Hagar and Van Halen.

The phrase "shine on, shine on" in the lyrics is similar to "we all shine on" from John Lennon's "Instant Karma." This phrase, according to Stephen King, inspired the title for his book (and later, movie) The Shining, where "the shining" is a kind of telepathy. In the film Twister, The Shining plays at the drive-in when a twister hits.