C major · Camelot 8B · 81 BPM
Changes
by Black Sabbath
- 81
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 29
- Danceability
- 4
- Acousticness
Tony Iommi wrote the piano melody at the heart of "Changes" while experimenting with the instrument in the studio. The Black Sabbath guitarist, better known for heavy riffs, came up with the part that would anchor the band's unlikely ballad, which appeared on Vol. 4 in 1972. Lyrics came from bassist Geezer Butler, and the song drew its main inspiration from drummer Bill Ward's break-up with his first wife. Vocalist Ozzy Osbourne later called it "heartbreaking".
The recording contained no real string ensemble. Instead, Butler and Iommi used a Mellotron to create the sound of an orchestra, and the finished track featured neither guitar nor drums, making it an outlier in the band's catalogue. Critic Barney Hoskyns described the result as a "forlornly pretty" ballad, quite different from anything Sabbath had done before.
Fans worried the band might be abandoning its heavy sound, so Osbourne addressed the concern in a 1972 interview. "We're certainly not going to get any less heavy," he said, adding that the band would probably perform the song on stage with a Mellotron but would never take strings on the road. The band first played it live in 1973. Osbourne returned to the song twice in later years, releasing a live version as a single from the Live & Loud album in 1993, then a studio duet with his daughter Kelly Osbourne in 2003.
Changes runs at 81 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.96 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 741 ms. It is in C major, Camelot 8B, which shares its notes with A minor and mixes cleanly with F major and G major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.