Ozzy Osbourne has said in a recent video interview with NME that the reformed Black Sabbath have around 15 songs written for a new album. The band’s reunion was announced late last year at a press conference in Los Angeles, where the 4 original band members talked about their intentions to get back together to tour and record a new album, which will be produced by Rick Rubin.
Since then, drummer Bill Ward has pulled out of any involvement and guitarist Tony Iommi has been battling cancer. Despite all this, the band are still going forward and are obviously keen to release something new for their fans.
“We’ve written about 15 songs so far, whether they’ll get on an album [I don’t know]… You just keep on writing. I was trying to [work out]: where would we be now musically if we’d have stayed together?”, says Osbourne. He also gives us an idea of when to expect it: “Next year, 2013, is a good clue of what we’ll call the album”, as if he was hinting that ‘2013’ would also be a possible album name.
In the same interview, Bassist Geezer Butler also reveals what Rick Rubin said to them as inspiration for their writing process: “Rick Rubin sat us down, put the first album on and said, ‘Listen to this. Imagine it’s 1969. You just did that. What would you do next?'”.
Ozzy Osbourne recently played some European shows in replacement for cancelled shows that Sabbath were supposed to be playing before Tony Iommi’s health issues came to light. Watch him and Slash play some classic Sabbath songs while they were in Bergen, Norway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aIhh9nFYv4
