The strangest sound on Black Sabbath’s fourth album is not a riff. It is a piano, played slowly and simply, with no electric guitar and no drums anywhere near it. Changes, the third track on Vol. 4, released in September 1972, is a plain, grieving ballad sung by Ozzy Osbourne in the most exposed voice he had ever put on record. Critic Barney Hoskyns called it “forlornly pretty,” and Osbourne himself has called the song “heartbreaking.” Nothing else in the Sabbath catalogue sounds like it, because nothing else in their catalogue was made this way: a guitarist teaching himself a new instrument, a lyricist writing about his bandmate’s collapsing marriage, and a heavy metal band discovering, almost by accident, that quiet could hit as hard as loud.
The Piano in the Ballroom
In the spring of 1972, Black Sabbath left England to make their fourth album in Los Angeles. They recorded at the Record Plant and lived in a rented mansion in Bel-Air — the only album the original lineup ever recorded in that city, and their first without producer Rodger Bain guiding the sessions. The house became their rehearsal space, playground and pressure cooker. Somewhere in it stood a grand piano, in the ballroom of the house, and Tony Iommi — a man famous for doing things with a guitar that nobody had done before — found himself drawn to an instrument he could not really play.
Iommi taught himself piano on that instrument, experimenting in the studio and at the house, and the melody of Changes came out of those experiments. Osbourne remembered the moment in his memoir: “With ‘Changes’, Tony just sat down at the piano and came up with this beautiful riff. I hummed a melody over the top, and Geezer wrote these heartbreaking lyrics about the break-up Bill was going through with his wife. I thought that was brilliant from the moment we recorded it.” It is worth pausing on how unlikely that division of labor was. Iommi, the band’s riff engine, supplied neither riff nor guitar. Osbourne, usually handed finished words, found the vocal melody by humming. And the song’s entire emotional weight was carried by a lyric written by the bass player about the drummer — the one member of the band who does not play a note on the track.
A Song About Bill
Geezer Butler wrote the words of Changes, and he wrote them about Bill Ward, whose first marriage was breaking up while the band worked in California. That is why the lyric feels less like a love song than like watching a friend lose the person he had built his life around. Its narrator does not rage or bargain; he simply inventories what is gone — the years shared, the days shared, the best friend he ever had — and returns, verse after verse, to the one flat sentence the song is named for. Sung by anyone else, it might have sounded generic. Sung by Osbourne about his own bandmate, in a house where all four of them were living and working on top of each other, it sounded like a dispatch from inside the room.
The recording matched that intimacy. There is no guitar and no drums on Changes at all. What you hear is Osbourne’s vocal, Iommi’s piano, and the swelling sound of an orchestra that is not really there: Butler and Iommi played a Mellotron, the tape-fed keyboard that could conjure strings, to fake the ensemble the band had no intention of hiring. The credits tell the story of the rearranged band — Osbourne on vocals, Iommi on piano and Mellotron, Butler on bass guitar and Mellotron, and Ward, the song’s subject, absent from the performance entirely.
Sabbath knew exactly how strange this looked from the outside. A ballad this tender, from a band parents and preachers were already denouncing as a menace, invited accusations that the heaviness had been a costume. Osbourne addressed it head-on in a 1972 interview: “We’re certainly not going to get any less heavy, we will probably do ‘Changes’ on stage with a Mellotron, but we’ll never take strings on stage with us or anything like that.” The band duly performed the song live for the first time in 1973 — though, tellingly, it never became a fixture of their sets. Changes was a studio confession, not a stage anthem, and for years it stayed where it was born: buried in the middle of an album, waiting for listeners to find it.
The Hit That Waited Thirty Years
Vol. 4 itself, released on September 25, 1972, was the band’s most experimental record yet, and Changes was its boldest departure — a ballad sitting among some of the heaviest music they ever made. But it was not released as a single at the time. Its commercial life began astonishingly late. In 1993, Osbourne released a live version as a single from his Live & Loud album, the song serving as a show closer in his solo set, performed with Zakk Wylde at the piano. A decade after that came the version nobody in 1972 could have imagined.
In 2003, Osbourne re-recorded Changes as a duet with his daughter Kelly. The revised lyrics reflected moments of their life together: where Ward’s story had been about a love ending, the new lyric was about a daughter growing up and a father watching it happen. Osbourne explained that Kelly had wanted a song about her, as he had written for her siblings, and that he chose to help her career by re-recording “one of my favourite songs of all time.” Released as a single on December 8, 2003, their Changes reached number one on the UK Singles Chart — only the second father-and-daughter duet ever to top that chart, after Frank and Nancy Sinatra with Somethin’ Stupid in 1967. It reached the top 20 in Germany, Ireland and Norway, and, according to Osbourne’s official website, sold over a million copies. The album track Sabbath had never even issued as a single had become, thirty-one years later, a number one hit. And the song’s bond with the family held to the very end: following Osbourne’s death in July 2025, their duet entered the UK Singles Downloads Chart at number eight, climbing to number seven a week later, as listeners went looking for the gentlest thing he ever sang.
The Soul Singer Who Claimed It
The song’s second life did not end with the Osbournes. Soul singer Charles Bradley first released his cover of Changes as a Record Store Day Black Friday single in 2013, then made it the title track of his 2016 album Changes. Bradley sang the lyric thinking of his mother, and of everything in his own life that had shifted since her death, and his version — all rasp, ache and slow-burning horns — revealed how completely the song had escaped its genre. A Black Sabbath piano ballad had become a soul standard in waiting. His recording later found still wider audiences as the theme to the animated series Big Mouth. Eminem, too, had already built his Going Through Changes, on the 2010 album Recovery, around a sample of the original. Metal, soul and hip-hop had all found their way to the same four minutes of piano.
That is the real story of Changes. It began as one friend writing about another friend’s divorce, on an instrument the composer had just taught himself, in a rented house in Bel-Air. It was never supposed to be a single, a chart-topper or a standard. Yet its plainness — the quality that made it such an outlier in 1972 — turned out to be its passport. Anybody who has lost someone can step inside it, which is why a soul singer could claim it, why a father and daughter could make it a number one, and why, at the band’s farewell concert at Villa Park in Birmingham in July 2025, it was the song chosen for one of the day’s most praised performances, sung by Yungblud and later released as a charity single. The quietest song Black Sabbath ever made became the one that travelled furthest. Sometimes the heaviest thing a band can do is put the guitar down.
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