Alien Love Secrets

This is an EP, released by Relativity on 21 March 1995 as 88561-1245-2, seven tracks. The Japanese edition, SRCS 7641, followed on 24 March with eight, adding San-San-Nana-Byoushi. It was written and recorded in under six weeks. Keyboards are minimal and the format is stripped to guitar, bass and drums, close to the way Vai made his 1984 debut Flex-Able. He has explained that he wanted to keep a steady output after Sex & Religion in 1993, but the recording of the next album, the 70-minute-plus Fire Garden, was taking too long; so this EP was deliberately released ahead of it. Stylistically it steps away from the mixed reception to Sex & Religion and back towards the instrumental rock of Passion and Warfare. Bad Horsie grew out of a riff Vai played during the final scenes of the 1986 film Crossroads. Juice was used in the 1996 PlayStation game Formula 1. Ya-Yo Gakk is a call-and-response with recordings of his young son Julian's voice. Tender Surrender, one of his best-known pieces, sits close to the sound, structure and tempo of Jimi Hendrix's Villanova Junction from Woodstock in 1969, though in a different key, and The Boy from Seattle is a tribute to Hendrix that Vai wrote. Vai counts the EP among his own favourites, saying he was more concerned with making the record he wanted to make than with worrying about what others thought he should be doing.