During a November 2023 appearance on BBC Radio 4‘s “Loose Ends” program, BLACK SABBATH guitarist Tony Iommi was asked if he remembered writing the guitar riff to “Paranoid”. He responded: “I can remember that one for sure. We were in the studio doing ‘Paranoid’ album, and the producer said… The other guys went out for something to eat, and I sat in the studio, and he said, ‘We need another song. We haven’t got enough songs on the album. Can you put one together?’ I went, ‘Well, no.’ We were only in there for a couple of days, you see. And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’ve never written a three-minute song.’ SABBATH‘s always written songs that were five minutes or six minutes long. So I came up with this idea and waited till the others came back from the pub. And then I played them the idea. And, basically, we’d done it there and then.”

Three years ago, Iommi told Planet Rock that “Paranoid” was “done as a filler. We had never done a three-minute song before … and it’s amazing what it did.”

Widely regarded as one of the greatest heavy metal songs of all time, “Paranoid” reached No. 4 on the U.K. singles chart and number 61 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.

“The only thing in them days for us with ‘Paranoid’ was it attracted a different audience to what we were used to,” Iommi told Planet Rock. “We saw a lot of screaming girls and things, which we weren’t used to at the gigs. And we were doing the U.K. TV show ‘Top Of The Pops’ and stuff like that. It was attracting a different audience to what we were expecting, and people would come in to hear the band play, who didn’t know us. They only heard ‘Paranoid’ on TV and thought, ‘Well, let’s go and see them.’ And of course, they ended hearing ‘Iron Man’ and all of the rest and thought, ‘Oh my God. What’s all of this?'”

In a 2004 interview with Guitar World magazine, BLACK SABBATH bassist Geezer Butler said that the “Paranoid” album was recorded “in about two or three days, live in the studio. The song ‘Paranoid’ was written as an afterthought. We basically needed a three-minute filler for the album, and Tony came up with the riff. I quickly did the lyrics, and Ozzy (Osbourne) was reading them as he was singing.

In the liner notes to SABBATH‘s “Reunion” album, Butler said that the music to the “Paranoid” title track was written “in five minutes, then I sat down and wrote the lyrics as quickly as I could. It was all done in about two hours.”

Regarding the lyrical inspiration for “Paranoid”, Butler said: “(‘Paranoid’ is) about depression, because I didn’t really know the difference between depression and paranoia. It’s a drug thing; when you’re smoking a joint, you get totally paranoid about people. You can’t relate to people. There’s that crossover between the paranoia you get when you’re smoking dope and the depression afterwards.”