Zakk Wylde is a guitar player first in almost everybody's description of him, which leaves out thirty years of singing. Black Label Society, the solo records and Pride & Glory before them all have his voice on them, and it started with covers at parties when he was a teenager.
Chaoszine sat him down in Helsinki on 8 August, before Black Label Society played Hellsinki Metal Festival, for an episode of their My Story As Metal Frontman series. He went back to the beginning: Black Sabbath's We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll, the 1975 compilation, which he found at eleven and which frightened him.
From there it is keg parties, then a voice that took years to arrive, then the routine he now goes through before a show. And then the part only he can report on: what standing next to Ozzy Osbourne and Rob Halford for decades teaches a person about singing. His answer to the whole of it is in the headline he gave them: music should not be work, it is what comes out of you.