In a recent conversation with Canada’s The Metal Voice, Doug Aldrich shared details about a never-released song he collaborated on with the late heavy metal legend Ronnie James Dio. This track, unfinished due to Dio‘s untimely passing in 2010, will be featured in an upcoming collection of Dio‘s unheard and rare recordings.
Doug said: ”Well, first of all, ‘Electra’ was part of what was gonna be a next album for Ronnie. He basically came up with ‘Electra‘ to promote the tour that he wanted to do at the end of 2009. He was gonna re-release Killing The Dragon and a live show that we did from that tour, and that song was gonna promote the album and the tour and it was gonna be this whole thing And then he got sick; he found out he had cancer. So it all went away. But the song ‘Electra’ did come out and it was pretty cool man. But prior to ‘Electra’, he had another song that — and I’m sure he had lots of bits of songs and maybe a few that were completed — but he did give me a completed song prior to ‘Electra’ that he wanted to be the promotional track.
“And then he basically moved away from that and we went with ‘Electra’ instead. But I had that [other] track, and I put a solo on it. It didn’t have a title, but I had it, and I talked to Wendy [Dio, Ronnie‘s widow and longtime manager] about it, and we never, she never… To be fair, I didn’t go over and play it for her, but I did talk to her about it on the phone. And then she kind of wasn’t ready to listen to anything like that at that point. Years went on. And then I ended up doing a renovation at my house and I took those hard drives and I put them in storage. So at the moment, there’s talk that Wendy wants to put out some stuff, some unreleased stuff next year, in ’24, with Ronnie, including a remake of the track that he sent me, which I’m still in the process of finding it.
“And Wendy texted me last week and said, ‘Any luck?’ And I said, ‘I’ll get it, Wendy.’ I just have dozens of hard drives I need to go through to find it. And once I do, I’ll give her the track and I’ll either record it with her and them or somebody else will. But it was haunting, because it was Ronnie playing bass and playing rhythm guitar with a drum machine and singing, and the vocal was just — it was haunting, man; really crazy.”
Expounding on how his unreleased collaborative song with Ronnie got misplaced among his personal belongings, Doug explained: “I did a renovation during 2020 when everything was shut down. I wanted to expand my house a little bit and clean it up and get new stuff. And so I wanted to pack everything up nice and neat and get it out of here. ‘Cause when there’s construction, hard drives would get dusty and all that. So I [packed everything up], including that computer was all backed up on a hard drive. So I’ll find it. And I hope Wendy has some other kickass stuff. I really do. ‘Cause that would be pretty cool to hear an album of unreleased stuff that was original music and/or some really cool versions [of previously released songs]. I can only imagine there’s gotta some cool stuff that they did that maybe they didn’t use with Viv [Vivian Campbell].”
