“Changes” by Black Sabbath

"Changes" is the moment on Vol. 4, Black Sabbath's 1972 album, when the band put down the sledgehammer and picked up a hanky. It's a ballad, and a sad one: Tony Iommi found the piano melody while messing around with the instrument in the studio, Geezer Butler wrote the words, and the heartache behind them was mostly Bill Ward's, drawn from the end of his first marriage.

There's no string section on it, either. Iommi and Butler conjured the orchestra out of a Mellotron, and Ozzy Osbourne sings over the top of it with a tenderness nobody knew he had in him; he later called the song heartbreaking. Critic Barney Hoskyns called it "forlornly pretty", and next to the rest of Sabbath's catalog it still sounds like a visitor from another planet. The band produced it with Patrick Meehan.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.