The legendary Zakk Wylde is back as Black Label Society release their latest album – the brilliantly titled Grimmest Hits. This, the tenth studio album for Black Label Society, has come as a bit of a surprise for fans of the band who knew that Wyle was busy on tour with his good friend Ozzy Osbourne. Somehow between playing huge festivals like Chicago Open Air, Louder Than Life and Ozzfest Meets Knotfest, recording a solo album and being busy with Zakk Sabbath Wylde has managed to create an absolute killer album and we caught up with him to chat about how it all came together.
When HEAVY catches up with Wylde it is 4am in the morning Melbourne time and after we joke that we are both getting too old to do these early mornings we talk about Wylde’s lack of time and how he managed to find time to put the album together with such a short window of time. “Well it kind of all came about while I was on the road with Zakk Sabbath,” he explains. “And I thought to myself how many days do I have until the guys have to head out and I realised I had twenty days. So I thought to myself ‘all right I have twenty days to do the record.’ So that was that… I had a deadline, I had twenty days to write a record and you know what, I enjoyed it? It was like my agent said you’ve got six months to a six pack of abs…. and I was just like cool, let’s do this, you have your last day of pizzas and cheeseburgers and then you stop. The writing was done in two weeks and then we just tracked everything’
When it came to inspiration Wylde says he just went with what he knew best. “It was just everything that I love,” he says. “Plus of course things that have happened to me and things that I have seen happen to other people. I might be reading somebody’s autobiography or something like that or might use a metaphor. I always like to do that kind of thing with the lyrics and it is pretty cool.”
Grimmest Hits by Black Label Society is out now and you can hear all of the interview through the audio player at the top of the page.
