There are moments in music history when two worlds that seem lightyears apart collide and create something startlingly human. Charles Bradley covering Black Sabbath’s Changes is one of those moments.
On paper, it sounds almost like a novelty: a soul singer reimagining a heavy rock ballad. But once you hear Bradley’s trembling voice wrap itself around those lyrics, you realize it’s not novelty at all. It’s alchemy. He takes a song born in the gloom of early seventies metal and carries it into the language of heartbreak, loss, and endurance.
Bradley’s performance is never polished in the modern sense. It wavers, it cracks, it holds long notes like he’s clutching onto them for dear life. That’s what makes it real. He lived the kind of life where the word “change” wasn’t abstract.
Before his late breakthrough, he had spent decades scraping by, working odd jobs, even performing as a James Brown impersonator just to stay afloat. So when he sang I’m going through changes, the words weren’t borrowed. They were worn into him.
At first glance, Black Sabbath and soul music sit on opposite sides of the record store. One conjures images of leather jackets and doom-laden riffs, the other of sharp suits and horn sections. But look closer and the kinship becomes obvious. Both were rooted in working-class struggle, both were vehicles for pain and protest, and both gave voice to people who often felt invisible.
Sabbath’s Changes, tucked inside the 1972 album Vol. 4, was already a departure. Stripped of heavy guitars, it leaned on piano and vulnerability. Bradley, decades later, didn’t so much cover it as claim it. He shifted the center of gravity from Tony Iommi’s keys to his own cracked, pleading voice. What had once been a lament about personal heartbreak transformed into something larger: a blues-soaked meditation on life’s unavoidable turns.
You don’t have to be a Sabbath fan or a soul devotee to feel it. You just have to be human. That’s the mark of a performance that will outlast its moment. Bradley’s Changes isn’t simply about revisiting the past. It’s about surviving it, carrying it forward, and singing it out so the rest of us don’t feel so alone when our own lives turn.