Bill Ward (Black Sabbath) shares the status of his upcoming solo album

Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward discussed his intentions to release solo music in the upcoming months in a recent interview with Dan Shinder of Drum Talk TV, as per Blabbermouth.

Currently we’re mastering a new album. And I’m not gonna reveal the name or the title of the album yet. But I’ve been recording two or three other albums in the last five years. But we have one album that’s literally at mastering stages. And then we have, like I said, two or three other albums that are ready to go once they’re mastered. So we have a plethora of recordings that we haven’t yet released.

When asked if he intended to release each album “at once or sequentially,” Bill responded as follows.

No. I don’t think that’ll be the case. I’m thinking about, actually packaging four or five albums in one package, or three or four albums in one package. But the newest album that we’re finishing, like I say, that we’re mastering now, will hopefully come out. We have to negotiate a recording company, and then hopefully that will come out to the public through all the various ways that we listen to music now, either in vinyl format or in digital format for telephones, and also possibly for CD formats as well.

Ward stated this about what fans may anticipate from his next album.

The album’s got — I think it’s got 18 tracks on it. So it’s quite a nice album and quite lengthy… It’s founded in what I know best, which is a really solid rhythm. But when I write, I go outside the box in terms of I don’t need to necessarily have the same imagery that was so popular with Black Sabbath. So, for me, I’ve gone into orchestrations, choirs, rhythm groups, different vocal groups. And there’s a lot of jazz on the album, as well as just straightforward rock or — I wouldn’t say the word ‘metal’, but I don’t know if I metallized it. But you can hear where I come from. You can hear where I spent a lot of my time, which was originally with Black Sabbath and before that Mythology and so on and so forth. So, those are my heroes back there. So those influences have carried forward. And we have tracks where we spent a lot of time with huge drum sounds, for effects and things like that. It’s a very colorful album.

Bill made this statement when discussing the most significant shifts in the music industry throughout the previous 20 to 40 years.

It’s more difficult to get a recording contract. I don’t wanna speak foul of the industry, because as things have developed from a listener point of view, then so goes the industry where it has to change. It has to be almost chameleon-like in terms of being able to ebb and flow with the requirements of the listener. So in these new industrial ideas, we have to find a place. We’ve been — my band and the fellows that I work with — we have to find a way that we can fit into all the requirements that have now developed, especially in the last maybe 10 years. There’s been a real turnaround on even how to buy a record. It’s a different world now. And for me, I’m fortunate because I have a really good crew. My crew understands what the heck’s going on, but quite frankly, I don’t. I’m 78 years old, so I try to just focus on writing, playing, and I do stuff like that. And I’m just truly blessed that I have a crew of much younger people that know what the heck’s going on as far as the industry’s concerned ’cause, to me, it’s just a different world. I lived in a different world completely.