Ozzy Osbourne recorded an entire album “sitting on a shelf” with rock legend Steve Vai.
The Grammy Award-winning musician, producer and songwriter, along with the 74-year-old Black Sabbath frontman, who recently announced his retirement from touring due to health issues, recorded “some pretty good songs.” has revealed that it has “no control” over whether to release the music.
The former Whitesnake guitarist, who has made music with Alice Cooper, Motörhead and Mary J. Blige, told Eonmusic: I “like” Gash records, but this is a project I recorded that sits on the shelf.
“Obviously I don’t control it or have the rights to it, but I recorded something pretty good.”
The two planned to record just one song together, but it went so well that they eventually completed the entire album.
62-year-old Steve recalls: And it was all fine and exciting until the hammer dropped. They basically said, “What are you doing? No, we’re just taking the songs from Vai and finishing the record. We’re already working on it for this amount of money, and Vai is going to pay for it.” And it really worked perfectly.
He revealed that one of the tracks is a reworked version of VAI/GASH’s “Danger Zone.”
Steve continues: [VAI / GASH’s] ‘Hazardous area’. I had already written it and it was already finished – it was a GASH track – so I thought ‘well he might like this one’ and reworked it a bit but it’s on the shelf .
And another track from the 1996 LP ‘Fire Garden’.
He added:
“That song originally had lyrics, and that was one of them.”
Steve admitted that following in the footsteps of Ozzy’s previous guitarists, including the late legendary Randy Rhoads, was nerve-wracking, so he came up with a unique and “accessible” style.
He explains: what are you going to do ‘I wasn’t going to be a convention.
“Yeah, you know, it’s not me, but I needed to be able to access it, so I thought, ‘I’m going to use octave dividers for everything.'”
From the pair’s sessions in the 1990s, the pair co-wrote “My Little Man,” which ended up on Ozzy’s 1995 LP, “Ozzmosis.”