Steve Vai clarifies ‘unreleased Ozzy Osbourne album’ comments: “I spoke a bit carelessly”

Steve Vai has issued a clarification regarding his recent comments about an unreleased album with Ozzy Osbourne in the vault.

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Taking to social media to address the issue, Vai admitted to speaking carelessly about the record and apologised for causing confusion among fans.

“In a recent interview I spoke a bit carelessly about ‘Sitting on an entire Ozzy album’ and then the clickbait headlines went viral,” the guitarist began. “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,” he continued.

“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.”

He added that while there was enough music for a full record, “those songs would require re-recording”.

“The demos are bumpy road maps but not the goal,” Vai said. “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.”

Earlier this week, Vai mentioned in an interview that he’d written a whole album with The Prince of Darkness while they were working on their 1995 collaboration My Little Man.

“We were having a lot of fun, and we ended up recording a lot of stuff,” the guitarist said.