“Changes” is a clear outlier in the Black Sabbath discography: Instead of guitar-driven metal/rock, it’s an emotional piano ballad. That made it the perfect song for Coldplay’s Chris Martin to use to honor the late Ozzy Osbourne, who died yesterday (July 22) at 76 years old.
Coldplay performed in Nashville last night, and early in the show, Martin took a moment to pay tribute to Osbourne (here’s a video), saying, “We’d like to dedicate this whole show to the incredible genius, talent, and character-full gift to the world who was Ozzy Osbourne. We send our love to his family.” Then, Martin, at the piano, performed a quick and stripped-down rendition of “Changes,” which opens, “I feel unhappy, I feel so sad / I’ve lost the best friend that I ever had / She was my woman, I loved her so / But it’s too late now, I’ve let her go / I’m going through changes / I’m going through changes.”
After finishing, Martin concluded, “Ozzy, we love you, wherever you’re going.”
In his 2010 autobiography I Am Ozzy, Osbourne discussed the song’s genesis, writing (as American Songwriter notes)
“We wanted to impress ourselves before we impressed anyone else. If other people happened to like what we were doing, that was just a bonus. That’s how we ended up doing songs like ‘Changes,’ which didn’t sound like anything we’d ever done before.
When a lot of people hear the name ‘Black Sabbath,’ all they think of is the heavy stuff. But there was a lot more to us than that — especially when we started making an effort to get away from all that black magic sh*t. With ‘Changes,’ Tony [Iommi] just sat down at the piano and came up with this beautiful riff, I hummed a melody over the top, and Geezer [Butler] wrote these heartbreaking lyrics about the breakup Bill [Ward] was going through with his wife at the time. I thought that was brilliant from moment the we recorded it.”