Creativity Quote by Geezer Butler

By the time Black Sabbath had become a machine, Geezer Butler is confessing they started acting like engineers. “Knocking out” songs suggests the early-band ethic: you walk in, you play, you capture the electricity before it evaporates. “Polish them to death” flips that impulse into a dark joke, and it’s a perfect Sabbath phrase: the music that once sounded like a factory accident becomes something overfinished, sanded down until the danger is gone.

The intent is half complaint, half diagnosis. Butler isn’t arguing against craft; he’s pointing at how success rewires the creative process. Rehearsal versions have urgency, a sense of risk. Later, the band has time, budget, expectations, and a myth to maintain. Polishing becomes a way to prove you’re still “professional,” but it can also be a way of getting scared: scared the take won’t live up to the legacy, scared of being sloppy, scared of being ordinary. So you keep tweaking, not because the song needs it, but because you do.

The subtext is about what heavy music is supposed to feel like. Sabbath’s power comes from groove and grit, from letting imperfections act like teeth. Over-polish turns menace into museum glass. Butler’s line lands because it’s both specific to a legendary band’s late-stage habits and broadly recognizable in any creative field: when the stakes rise, spontaneity is the first casualty, and “better” becomes a quiet synonym for “safer.”