Steve Vai has explained his recent statement that enough material was recorded with Ozzy Osbourne for a full album.
In a recent talk with Eonmusic, the guitarist said that he had “a whole Ozzy record” on hand, but he did not have the authority to do anything with the material.
In a new post on social media, Vai disclosed that even though enough music was put together for an entire album, the songs weren’t finished and would need to be re-recorded before being released to the public.
Steve wrote: “In a recent interview I spoke a bit carelessly about ‘Sitting on an entire Ozzy album’ and then the clickbait headlines went viral.
“To clarify, Ozzy and I got together back around 96 and spent some time trying to come up with some potential songs for an album that he already had half recorded. That record later came out as ‘Ozzmosis’. We demoed a handful of tracks and then there was a bunch of tracks I built for him to check out. He ended up picking one song to use on his album and that’s ‘My Little Man’.
“It was re-recorded with his band, and it came out great. Only one other demoed track from those sessions had an Ozzy scratch vocal on it and I handed in all the Master demo tapes to the label and kept safety tapes of the tracks I personally built. All in all, there was (is) enough music for a whole record, but those songs would require re-recording. The demos are bumpy road maps but not the goal.
“I, like many Ozzy fans, would love if there was a secret hidden Ozzy album somewhere, only to be revealed to our surprised ears at a future time, but it wouldn’t come from those sessions. So sorry for the confusion.”
Vai previously told Eonmusic about his collaboration with Ozzy: “Well, I’m sitting on a whole Ozzy record, and it’s like the GASH record — not ‘like’ the Gash record, but it’s a project that I recorded that’s sitting on the shelf,” Vai revealed. “I don’t have any control over it or rights to it, obviously, but we did record some pretty good stuff.”
Continuing his discussion, Vai described the sound of the album as being very unique.
“The interesting thing about that stuff we recorded from a guitar perspective is all of my rhythm guitar parts, I use an octave divider [guitar effect], and that the record doesn’t sound like anything else,” he added.
Asked how close he came to joining Ozzy‘s band, Vai said: “So Ozzy and I, basically what happened as far as I recognized, Ozzy had recorded about half of his record [Ozzmosis] for the record company, and Sharon [Ozzy‘s wife and manager] and the label wanted to get him together with some different songwriters to just get some more songs.”
“I was one of the ones that they wanted to get together with. It was really just to write some songs for Ozzy‘s record that he would then take and go use for his record, and whoever he was working with on the record would record it. So I thought, ‘Yeah, that’d be great. I’d love to do that.’”
As the collaboration progressed, more than just the initially planned couple of tracks came to fruition in their joint venture.
“Ozzy and I got carried away because we were having a lot of fun, and we ended up recording a lot of stuff,” laughed Vai, “and then we started scheming, ‘Hey, let’s make a new record.’ And all that was fine and good, and we got excited about it until the hammer came down, and they basically said, ‘What are you doing? No, you’ve just got to take a song from Vai and finish your record. We’re already into it for this much money, and Vai is expense,’ so it worked out perfect, really.”
