I was in somebody’s office and there was a magazine on a table and it just said, ‘God Is Dead’, and I suddenly thought about 9/11 and all these terrorist things and religion and how many people have died in the name of religion. When you think about the tragedy that’s happened throughout time, it just came in my head. You’d think by now that their God would have stopped people dying in the name of, so I just starting thinking that people must be thinking, ‘Where is God? God is dead’ and it just hit me. At the end of the thing, there’s still a bit of hope because there I sing that I don’t believe that God is dead. It’s just a question of when you see so many dreadful people killing each other with bombs, and blowing the tube trains up and the World Trade Center.

—Ozzy Osbourne

Rubin told Rolling Stone,

This time, I tried to get them to work in the way they used to work, where a lot of material would happen through jamming. So they would have a part to start from like a jazz band, so Tony [Iommi] would have one or two main riffs and then take it into different directions. I sort of picked the main riffs for them to start with together, and then they’d just jam and see what direction they went into. So the songs are very intuitive, not organized like regular songs. They really move more based on just improvisational principles, and that comes through on this song.

People think of them as heavy metal, but they’re really a rock band, and they’re really a progressive rock band in the same way that Led Zeppelin is. So much of it is rooted in blues and improvisation. The people who have come in their wake don’t have the skill set that they have. It’s much more like jazz the way Black Sabbath play.

There were always antics, and they would always sort of make fun of each other and make each other laugh, and clearly Ozzy is very, very funny all the time and just great to be around. They’re really nice people. We laughed a lot. That whole record was so much fun. How do these guys just start a riff and it falls right into that sound? It’s in them [laughs]. It’s unbelievable.