Steve Vai has revealed that he and Ozzy Osbourne “got carried away” after being asked to write songs together back in 1995, and wound up recording an entire unreleased album instead.
“I’m sitting on a whole Ozzy record,” Vai tells EonMusic. “It’s a project that I recorded that’s sitting on the shelf. I don’t have any control over it or the rights to it, obviously, but we did record some pretty good stuff.”
Osbourne was recording Ozzmosis when his label and manager decided it would be good for him to write songs with different people. “Ozzy and I got carried away because we were having a lot of fun,” Vai explains, “and we ended up recording a lot of stuff. And then we started scheming: ‘Hey, let’s make a new record!'”
Listen to Ozzy Osbourne Perform ‘My Little Man’
Vai said they continued forward the project, “until the hammer came down, and [management] basically said ‘What are you doing? No, you’ve just got to take a song from Vai and finish your record.'”
Only one track from the duo’s time together, “My Little Man,” made it onto Ozzmosis, but two other tracks have turned up on Vai records. “Danger Zone” appears on his recently unearthed 1991 collaborative album Vai / Gash with singer Johnny “Gash” Sombretto, while “Dyin’ Day” found a home on 1996’s Fire Garden.
Listen to Vai / Gash Perform ‘Danger Zone’
“There was some real, real heavy stuff because I used an octave divider on everything,” Vai says of the unreleased Osbourne recordings. “I thought, ‘Okay you’re going to work with Ozzy, and all these incredible guitar players have played with Ozzy. What are you going to do?’ I was not going to be conventional. … That’s not me, as you know, but I had to be accessible.”
Listen to Steve Vai Perform ‘Dyin’ Day’
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