Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler says the band tabled plans for a fourteenth studio around the time they finished their last one, appropriately titled 13.
"The follow-up to 13 was going to be a blues album, but the tour got in the way," said Butler in an interview with Music Radar, who adds the band weighed its options with an ultra-pragmatic, if not morbid consideration.
"It would take something like two or three years to do [the album] properly, and we thought we might not all be here by that time, so it would be better to do this final tour first and then maybe we'll do a blues record later."
But the thought makes a lot of sense. When Sabbath was plotting its last tour, guitarist Tony Iommi was undergoing cancer treatment for the second time in about five years.
The challenge of a blues album, Butler says, is keeping it fresh.
"You'd have to make it varied instead of doing 10 tracks of the same old 12-bar blues though...And I'm still writing new stuff quite a bit."
Furthermore, in an interview after Black Sabbath's final show, Iommi talked to U.K. radio company Planet Rock about how Sabbath might continue.
"It's just the touring for me -- it's time to stop roaming the world and be at home for a bit...I'm still going to write and put stuff out."
Butler adds that, regardless of what Sabbath ends up doing in the future, he'll play music as long as he can.
"I might not play music publicly but I'll always be writing and I'll still play every day. It's my hobby as well as my career. I still love to collect guitars -- and I still love playing bass."
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