(Credits: Far Out / Bruce Baker / Ozzy Osbourne)
Fri 16 January 2026 4:00, UK
At 62 years of age, Charles Bradley finally released his debut album and had us all wondering what exactly took him this long.
One of the truest stories of never giving up, Bradley continued to chip away at the grindstone, staying true to his art in the face of continued goddamn rejection, only to finally get his much-deserved recognition at a later age.
Even before breaking through as an artist with his debut album in 2011, Bradley experienced a life of never-ending pain. His childhood was spent living with his mother and sleeping in a sand-covered basement, before moving to New York, where he spent most of his young adulthood in homelessness. Days spent on the streets and nights spent in the subways hardened Bradley to the brutal realities of life lived in the shadows of capitalism.
So by the time he got his breakthrough at 62, the woes of the artistic world held less gravitas than perhaps someone in their career infancy. Feelings of rejection were contextualised with the real-life problems he faced, and so his music was freed up, allowing for a genuine sense of emotional liberation to bleed through all of his music.
But then in 2016, Bradley diverted his approach. Having finally enjoyed some commercial success with his own music, he decided to take on a cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘Changes’. In a somewhat bizarre twist of fate, it was a song that was almost tailor-made for his voice, with the chorus line of “I’m going through changes” seemingly encapsulating the shifting tides of his life.
Bradley didn’t know the song initially, explaining, “I never heard of that guy [Ozzy Osbourne] before.” But then he continued, outlining how the emotion of ‘Changes’ resonated with him on such a deep level that he struggled to grapple with his own performance of it.
He explained, “At first, I couldn’t sing ‘Changes’. Every time I do it, I want to cry. The last part is so serious: ‘It took some time to realise / I can still hear her last goodbyes / But now all my days have turned to tears / I wish I could go back, mama, and change these years’. That’s so touching to me.”
So how, if Bradley had never heard the track, did he stumble upon it as a potential cover? Well, the idea came from his longtime collaborator, guitarist and producer Thomas Brenneck, who joined Bradley on stage during his early days of bouncing around Brooklyn bars.
While Sabbath’s original track was about the loss of a lover, Brenneck recognised that the pain within the lyrics could be applied to Bradley’s personal life and, more specifically, the death of his mother in 2013, which is ultimately why Bradley labels that particular verse as the song’s most cutting.
His performance breathed new life into the Sabbath classic, with the track’s songwriter, Geezer Butler, even admitting that Bradley’s take on ‘Changes’ was the greatest cover of his band’s work. “Just the soulfulness in his voice,” he enthused, “It’s so soulful”.
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