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GW He was a guy that wrote tender love songs like “There’s Something Dead in Here,” “Chronic Insomnia” and “Garbage Wrapped in Skin.”

VAI [laughs] “Garbage Wrapped in Skin” is actually going to be on the new release! Anyway, listening to the tapes immediately brought me back to that place, which was such a wonderful, sweet period of my life. Living in Sylmar [California], having that little studio, with my wife Pia—we’ve been together for 30 years—and so many of my friends. It was like a wayward home for musician refugees! There were nine people living in the house, and I had this really great studio in the back. We just made music and we didn’t care about anything. We just did stuff to make each other laugh, and I never expected it to be released. I recorded tons and tons and tons of stuff.

Listening to it brings me back to that time. And it’s a weird record, of course. It’s really quirky. Through the years, I’ve read things about it, and people have said, “Oh, that’s such a weird record, it’s so quirky, it’s nothing like what he does now.” And there have been times when I’ve thought, Yeah, that was bizarre—that’s not me…I’m “Steve Vai,” now! But I went back and listened to it and said, Man, it’s so beautiful because it’s so innocent  and it’s so silly. It was a real joy to remaster it, too, because now it sounds completely different. It does have tracks like “The Attitude Song,” and that’s really just one little sliver, and I could have done an entire record like that. But it’s a perfect representation of that time in my life, which was a wonderfully creative period.

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