Steve Vai reveals he has an unreleased record with Ozzy Osbourne in storage: “We got carried away because we were having a lot of fun”
What started as writing sessions for 1995’s Ozzmosis turned into much more.
Steve Vai and Ozzy Osbourne. Credit: Larry DiMarzio / Harry How / Getty
Guitar great Steve Vai has shared that he wrote a whole album with Ozzy Osbourne while the duo were working on their 1995 collaboration My Little Man.
In a new interview with eonmusic, Vai revealed that the duo enjoyed the process of collaborating together while working on the track for Osbourne’s album Ozzmosis so much that they decided to make an album together on the spot. “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,” Vai recalled, adding that he jumped on the opportunity. “But 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!’ All that was fine and good and we got excited about it until the hammer came down. 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 expensive,'” he said, with My Little Man eventually chosen from the duo’s work together to be included on Ozzmosis.
Vai also shared that some of the songs from this album are under consideration, with Dyin’ Day from his 1996 album Fire Garden having previously been one of the tracks the two wrote that was under consideration. “One of the songs was Danger Zone, I had already written it, and it was already done – it was a Gash track – and I thought, ‘Well, maybe he’d like this,’ and I reworked it a bit, but it’s on the shelf,” he said.