10 Songs That Are Huge Outliers On Rock Albums
1. Changes - Vol. 4 (Black Sabbath)
Black Sabbath are very good at making dark, demonic sounding music that acted as the ancestor for most modern metal music.
However, would you trusy Ozzy Osbourne - a man who once urinated on the Alamo wearing one of his wife's dresses - to write a sincere piano ballad?
Well, someone did, and it turned into one of their most famous songs.
Changes first turned up on the band's fourth album Vol. 4, nestled in amongst chunky guitar tracks like Snowblind and Under the Sun. Written by Tony Iommi after he was messing around in the studio with a piano, it tells the story of a man lamenting the loss of someone close to him.
It is the complete opposite of everything else Sabbath had done up to this point. It's soft, it's sentimental, it's radio-friendly. Ozzy even sounds like he can actually sing!
The song came out of nowhere, but has been fully embraced by the Sabbath fanbase and the wider music community.
Well, until Ozzy decided to ruin it by doing a duet with his daughter. That was a rough time for everyone.