Photo Credit: Geezer Butler at Back to the Beginning, Villa Park, Birmingham, 2025 (Public Domain)
Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler reveals he’s using AI to bring his previously unreleased material to life, some of which he wrote back in the 80s.
It’s easy to forget the practical applications of artificial intelligence amid the controversy surrounding the technology, but musicians like Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler are using AI to realize some old material. Butler revealed during a Q&A at Steel City Con this week that he’s using an AI singer to present tracks to real vocalists who will contribute to his new album.
“Oh gosh, I’ve got tons of stuff,” Geezer said during the interview in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. “Since we finished the last Sabbath show [Back to the Beginning in July], I’ve just been going through all the stuff that I’ve written since the ‘80s onwards and updating everything. And what held me back before, I didn’t have a singer when I’m at home. But AI came along, so all my songs now, I’ve updated them all and I’m using an AI singer to bring all the lyrics out.”
“So, now I can take it to singers that I’m gonna be working with and go, ‘This is what I want on the album,’ so they’ve got a better idea,” he explained. “Before, I was just like, playing them a bass riff or something, going, ‘Can you sing to this?’ And they’d be going, ‘…Yeah.’ But it’s so much better now, because you can sit in your studio and do everything on AI, and then take it to proper musicians and let them take over. It’s really helped me. A lot of people think it’s cheating.”
“With Sabbath, we’d sit down in a room together and just jam and jam and jam until somebody came up with something that we could work with,” Butler said of his earlier songwriting process, especially alongside his Black Sabbath bandmates. “Once we had a good riff to write to, we’d finish the music part of it. Ozzy [Osbourne] would sing his vocal line, then I’d write the lyrics. So it mainly came from jamming.”
Best known for his work with Black Sabbath, Geezer Butler started his career in the late 1960s, performing with bands like Heaven & Hell, Deadland Ritual, and his solo projects g/z/r, geezer, and GZR. His first solo album, Plastic Planet, was released in 1995 and featured vocalist Burton C. Bell (Fear Factory). He followed it up with 1997’s Black Science and 2005’s Ohmwork, both of which featured vocalist Clark Brown.
