This is what Ronnie James Dio used to do while composing music

Ronnie James Dio‘s widow and longtime manager Wendy Dio discussed the legendary heavy metal singer’s decision to leave Black Sabbath in 1982 and release his legendary debut solo album, “Holy Diver,” under the DIO banner in 1983 during an appearance on the most recent episode of the “100 Songs That Define Heavy Metal” podcast, which is hosted by Metal Blade Records CEO Brian Slagel, as per Blabbermouth.

Well, I had gotten him a recording deal while he was with Black Sabbath, and he was not intending to leave but to maybe do something in between when they weren’t working. But then it came that he left the band. And, yeah, he had written two songs, actually, ‘Holy Diver’ and ‘Don’t Talk To Strangers’, that were written for Black Sabbath, while he was in Black Sabbath. But then they became his beginning of the DIO years.

Wendy responded as follows when asked if Ronnie wrote only the words, the music, or a little bit of both.

Oh, yeah, everything. People think that Ronnie’s just a lyricist. He’s not; he writes music as well. He played trumpet for many, many, many years. He played guitar, played bass — well, he played bass in ELF. He would sit and write songs, watching sports with his guitar, his acoustic guitar, on his lap. And he would always write watching baseball or football, because he said that that gave him inspiration, but it wasn’t stealing somebody else’s music.

She also talked about his method for penning lyrics.

He used to read a lot of science-fiction books. And I don’t know — he’d just come up. I mean, things like [lyrics from ‘Holy Diver’], ‘Ride the tiger. You can see his stripes, but you know he’s clean’. I mean, whatever he was writing about, it was always like that somebody could interpret their own feeling of what the song was about… He knew what the song was about, but he would like people to interpret what they thought.