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brightTopic: Heavy Metal
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne is working on two new albums and the first one could be ready by February.
"I don't want to release an album if it's not a great album," the 1970s heavy metal pioneer said in an interview in New York Friday, declining to give many details about the album.
"I primarily write an album for myself, and if the world likes it, great," he said. "I'm just hoping that I can get a good couple of albums out."
Osbourne was cautious about when the album would be ready, but his wife, Sharon, who is also his manager, said "hopefully" it would released in February.
The self-proclaimed "Prince of Darkness" said he was working on the two albums with guitarist Zakk Wylde, whose band Black Label Society is one of the main acts in Osbourne's annual hard-rock traveling festival, Ozzfest.
"I can't say anything about the songs," Osbourne said at an event in New York to launch a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt to raise money for his wife's cancer charity.
Osbourne, a recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, said he was enjoying playing on the smaller second stage at Ozzfest this year because it allowed him to get closer to the audience.
"I look at the audience sometimes and I go 'Do they ever grow up and get older?"' he said, expressing some surprise at his enduring popularity with a whole new generation of fans.
"They come, they like it, and they bring their friends. It's weird," he said, adding: "I'm not complaining."
The long-haired singer from Birmingham, England, enjoyed a huge popular revival in recent years as the paterfamilias of a chaotic family in the TV reality series "The Osbournes" on MTV, which chronicled the ups and downs of his family life, including his wife's battle with colon cancer.
Two of the couple's teenage children featured on the show came under intense media scrutiny and both have had much publicized battles with alcohol abuse.
But Sharon Osbourne said "The Osbournes" was still the best reality series ever made. "Ozzy single-handedly opened the door for all of these people who are doing reality TV now," she said. "We were the first, we're the best."
"It affected the children but look at what happened to my children now -- they're two great, healthy, strong, independent people. They're living a successful life," she said.
"So ultimately it turned out great for them. There was good and bad, but let me tell you, there was more good."
Courtesy of www.reuters.com
Written By The Rock News Blog
at 1:00 PM EDT
