The original version of this song, in the context of Black Sabbath’s catalogue of guitar-driven riff-rock anthems, is a bit of an oddball.
With all respect to Black Sabbath (whom we featured way back in week 46) the piano part sounds childishly simple, as if it was written by a guitarist who was experimenting with a keyboard. Which makes sense, because it was written…by the band’s guitarist, who was experimenting with a keyboard. Then there are the lyrics which aren’t exactly the peak of poetry. The first line sounds like it’s lifted directly from a thesaurus: “I feel unhappy / I feel so sad.”
After the song’s release, Ozzy Osbourne had to appease fans by stating that Sabbath was “certainly not going to get any less heavy” or start bringing string sections on stage in their live shows.
But it’s still a good little tune.
And like any good cover song, Charles Bradley’s interpretation takes the best ingredients from the original and pulls them into their potential. Bradley injects into “Changes” the pain and love of a truly extraordinary life.
I won’t get into the details of Charles Bradley’s difficult, heartbreaking, and ultimately triumphant life – there is a documentary that can do that nicely for you – but the part of his life most relevant here is his relationship with his mother.
She abandoned him when he was an infant, leaving his grandmother to raise him. When Bradley was eight, his mother reappeared, and they lived together until he ran away at age 14. After years of homelessness and struggle and intermittent contact between the two, she crossed the country on a Greyhound bus to reconnect with him in the late 1990s. Bradley took care of her through her later years, and she lived to see her son’s unlikely career in music take off with the release of his first album (when he was sixty-two!) in 2011.
His version of “Changes” was recorded for his third – and final – record, and it was while he was in the process of recording it that his mother died. He later told Rolling Stone:
“The verse that really stuck to me was, ‘It took so long to realize / That I can still hear her last goodbyes / Now all my days are filled with tears / Wish I could go back and change these years.’ Because it was like my mom saying she was sick and she was leaving me and something about that song … I just took the last lyrics and wow. So I got stuck on it. I didn’t really have to ‘learn’ it; it just stuck to my brain.”
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The fragile power of Charles Bradley’s voice – like a trumpet lined with sandpaper – is really unlike anything else recorded this century.
2. The organic, analog funk of the Budos Band provides a rich musical backdrop that primes the listener for that unmistakable voice.
3. The slower, swinging tempo in Bradley’s version provides a heavier, blues-ier feel that makes the emotion of the song come across in a visceral, genuine way.
Recommended listening activity:
Appreciating something about your life that is better now than it was a year ago.