Guitar virtuoso Steve Vai supposedly recorded an entire album with Ozzy Osbourne that the world may never hear. In a new interview with Eonmusic, Vai revealed that he and the Prince of Darkness banged out a full record back in the mid-Nineties, when the two musicians were paired up together to write a couple songs for Osbourne's 1995 solo record, Ozzmosis.
The only song that emerged from the sessions was "My Little Man," an Ozzmosis track that Vai and Osbourne co-wrote. But according to Vai, their brief creative partnership was so productive that they ended up throwing together an entire collaborative record before it was ultimately scrapped so Osbourne could focus on his solo material.
Vai opened up about this long-lost collaboration while promoting his newest album, Vai / Gash, which also happens to be a previously unreleased LP from the vaults that Vai initially recorded back in the 90s.
"Well, I'm sitting on a whole Ozzy record, and it's like the Gash record," Vai told Eonmusic. "Not 'like' the Gash record, but it's a project that I recorded that's sitting on the shelf. I don't have any control over it or rights to it, obviously, but we did record some pretty good stuff."
In terms of the sound, Vai described the album as very heavy and also 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," Vai said. "There was some real, real heavy stuff because, as I mentioned, I used an octave divider on everything, and that's was a conscious effort."
Vai then went on to describe how he and Osbourne got linked up in the first place, and why they decided to break away from the Ozzmosis writing to craft their very own album.
"Ozzy had recorded about half of [Ozzmosis] for the record company, and Sharon [Osbourne, Ozzy's wife and manager] and the label wanted to get him together with some different songwriters to just get some more songs," Vai explained. "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.'
"Ozzy and I got carried away because we were having a lot of fun, and we ended up recording a lot of stuff. 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."
Vai didn't make it seem like it would ever see the light of day, but the fact that it exists at all is pretty wild to think about.
