Steve Vai has shared a statement clarifying remarks he made about recording an album with Ozzy Osbourne.
In a recent interview with eonmusic, the guitar virtuoso shared that he was “sitting on a whole Ozzy record,” adding, “It’s a project that I recorded that’s sitting on the shelf.”
After outlets picked up Vai’s quote, he took to Facebook to explain that said Ozzy record isn’t as concrete as his original comments may have made it seem.
“In a recent interview I spoke a bit carelessly about ‘Sitting on an entire Ozzy album’ and then the clickbait headlines went viral,” Vai writes. He then recounts how he and Ozzy entered the studio together to write some more songs for the Prince of Darkness’ 1995 solo effort, Ozzmosis.
“We demoed a handful of tracks and then there was a bunch of tracks I built for [Ozzy] to check out,” Vai says. “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.”
Vai adds that while there’s “enough music for a whole record” on those tapes, “those songs would require re-recording.”
“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,” Vai concludes. “So sorry for the confusion.”
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