Steve Vai will release his Gash record, written and recorded in 1991 with the late Johnny "Gash" Sombrotto on vocals, on February 24. Though it turns out that's not the only record Vai has been sitting on over the years.
In an interview with Eonmusic, Vai reveals he and Ozzy Osbourne did an entire album at some point that remains unreleased.
"Well, I'm sitting on a whole Ozzy record, and it's like the Gash record — not 'like' the Gash record, but it's a project that I recorded that's sitting on the shelf," said Vai. "I don't have any control over it or rights to it, obviously, but we did record some pretty good stuff".
Vai worked with Osbourne here and there during the mid '90s, even writing the track "My Little Man" for the 1995 album Ozzmosis. Vai said the collaboration on Ozzmosis could've gone further but Sharon Osbourne and the label wanted more songwriters on the record.
"So Ozzy and I, basically what happened as far as I recognized, Ozzy had recorded about half of his record for the record company, and Sharon and the label wanted to get him together with some different songwriters to just get some more songs."
"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. So I thought, 'Yeah, that'd be great. I'd love to do that.'"
Despite the collaboration being short-lived, Vai said it was around then that he and Osbourne wrote the currently-unreleased album. Vai revealed that the Gash song "Danger Zone" was one that he and Osbourne worked on, as well as his own 1996 solo song "Fire Garden."
"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.' And all that was fine and good, and we got excited about it until the hammer came down, and 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 expense,' so it worked out perfect, really."
So here's hoping we get this record eventually, right? As far as how the record sounds, Vai said "The interesting thing about that stuff we recorded from a guitar perspective is all of my rhythm guitar parts, I use an octave divider [guitar effect], and that the record doesn't sound like anything else."
