Ozzy Osbourne Recorded A Full Album With Steve Vai

Keavin Wiggins | 02-20-2023

Ozzy Osbourne Ozzmosis and Vai's Inviolate album covers

Former David Lee Roth guitarist Steve Vai revealed during a new interview that he is "sitting on a whole Ozzy [Osbourne] record", that he recorded with the legendary Black Sabbath frontman back in the mid 1990s.

Vai spoke to eonmusic about his new Vai / Gash album that was shelved for three decades. During the chat, Steve was asked what it was like to work with Ozzy in the 1990s

Vai co-wrote the song, "My Little Man", that appeared on Ozzy's 1995 album "Ozzmosis". However, Vai revealed that the two actually worked on an entire album at the time.

He shared, "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. I don't have any control over it or rights to it, obviously, but 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 [guitar effect], and that record doesn't sound like anything else.

Steve explained in a follow-up answer how the collaboration came about, "Okay, so Ozzy and I, basically what happened as far as I recognized, Ozzy had recorded about half of his record [ 'Ozzmosis', 1995] for the record company, and Sharon 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. So I thought; 'yeah, that'd be great. I'd love to do that', but 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."