It’s been four years since Ozzy Osbourne’s last solo album, Scream, and it’s pretty safe to say that no one’s clamoring for another solo album from the Ozzman unless we’re talking about something on the level of 1991’s No More Tears. That’s not stopping Ozzy from returning to his solo career after releasing another Black Sabbath album, or at least that’s what he told Esquire in an interview. Doing an interview around his new DVD, Memoirs of a Madman, Ozzy states that he can’t focus on both Sabbath and his solo album, so after the band come out with their next album, he’ll disband them:

I’m not one of these guys to do my solo stuff one night and Black Sabbath the next. I can’t do that, you know. It’s too much to handle. So with the Black Sabbath thing, the record company wants us to do one more record, and we’ve decided to do one more tour, and at the end of the tour we just disband and I go back to doing my solo stuff. And that’s why I released Memoirs of a Madman, to let people out there know I’m still functioning as a solo artist.

He doesn’t completely rule out another Sabbath album, though, as later, he states “if this is Black Sabbath’s last hurrah, then we’ll have ended it on an up note rather than when I left in 1979 and everybody was fucked up on one thing or another and I was marked out as being the worst, you know.” That “if” means that it’s not totally out of the question, but there are a lot of variables, mainly Tony Iommi’s health. He also states that they haven’t started work on the new album yet:

I texted [guitarist] Tony [Iommi] the other day. I said, “It would be a great idea if you could send me some musical ideas so I can try and work some melodies around so we don’t have to go searching for the song structure.” So I’m not starting from a cold block, you know?

You know what would be awesome? Getting a text from Ozzy Osbourne. Given that there hasn’t been any music written for the next Sabbath album (14?) yet, it’ll probably be late next year at the earlier we’ll hear new Sabbath. Hopefully it’ll be with Bill Ward this time. And Ozzy probably won’t put out a solo album for a year or two after that. So yeah, Ozzy, who turns 66 in December, might not have another solo album out until he’s 68.