STEVE VAI Clarifies His OZZY OSBOURNE Comments, Apologizes For The 'Confusion'

Steve Vai has clarified his recent comments that he had enough material recorded with Ozzy Osbourne for a full album.

In an interview with Eonmusic, the guitarist said that he was "sitting on a whole Ozzy record", adding that he couldn't do anything with the material because he didn't have any rights to it.

But now in a social media post, Vai revealed that while there was enough music written for a whole album, the songs were never completed and would require re-recording 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."

In the Eonmusic interview, Vai said about his Ozzy collaboration: "We did record some pretty good stuff. The interesting thing about that stuff we recorded from a guitar perspective is all of my rhythm guitar parts, I use an octave divider, and that record doesn’t sound like anything else."

He continued: "Ozzy had recorded about half of his record 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. So 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."

Vai also revealed that he worked on an early version of "Dyin' Day" for the Ozzy album, a song which was later reworked for the guitarist's 1996 solo record "Fire Garden". Another track, "Danger Zone", was a song that Vai had already for his project with Johnny "Gash" Sombrotto on vocals, a record that was started around 1990 but was never finished before Gash's death in 1998 and was only released this year.

Ozzy Osbourne photo credit: Ross Halfin