Ozzy Osbourne: 20 Essential Songs

Musicologists will never agree on the precise moment that heavy metal was born, but there’s a strong argument to be made it took place at Black Sabbath’s rehearsal hall in 1969 when they wrote a song so powerful it became the name of their new band. “We knew we had something,” Tommy Iommi writes in his memoir, Iron Man. “You could feel it, the hairs stood up on your arms, it just felt so different.” The lyrics to the six-minute song were inspired by a memory Geezer Butler had of waking up one morning after reading a book about the occult and seeing a large black figure standing at the edge of his bed. Osbourne’s vocal delivery is haunting, including chilling moans of “Oh noooo” and “Please God help me,” and the song builds to a soaring climax. It set the stage for not just every Black Sabbath song that followed, but also an entirely new genre of music. —Andy Greene

Up until the summer of 1970, heavy metal was dismissed by much of the music industry as a fringe genre with little mass appeal. But then a little band from Birmingham, England, released “Paranoid” as the leadoff single from its second LP, and watched it chart all over the world, peaking at Number Four in the U.K. and Number 61 in America. The song, which starts with a Tony Iommi riff, came together in the final hours of the sessions for an album the group was planning to call War Pigs. Once they realized the brilliance of their impromptu creation, they changed the name of the album to Paranoid. The rest is heavy-metal history. And over the past 50 years, whether he was playing solo or with Black Sabbath, Osbourne was unable to leave any concert stage without playing it. “I just call it my anthem,” Osbourne said in 2019. “It’s a simple song with an effective rhythm. It’s got its own color, it’s got its own vibe. I like to think that people in the years to come will still get enjoyment out of it. Every now and then you get a song from nowhere, it’s a gift.” —A.G.

After a sighing guitar note and a robotic voice proclaiming, “I am Iron Man,” Osbourne narrates a sci-fi horror story about a jilted metal monster on this hit off Sabbath’s Paranoid album. “This is about a guy who invented a time machine, and he goes through time and finds the world is going to end,” Osbourne said in 1970, explaining bassist Geezer Butler’s lyrics. “Coming back, he turns to iron and people won’t listen to him; they think he’s not real. He goes a bit barmy and decides to get his revenge by killing people. He tries to do good but in the end it turns into bad.” The song’s power comes from Tony Iommi’s lumbering guitar riff, but it’s the sadness in Osbourne’s voice as he sings, “Nobody wants him, they just turn their heads/Nobody helps him, now he has his revenge,” that made it an instant classic. —Kory Grow

Black Sabbath’s 1972 piano ballad “Changes” is a very atypical song for the band, but it started in very typical fashion: Tony Iommi doing coke late in the evening and messing around with a melody. This was on the piano in the ballroom of a huge Bel Air mansion they used while recording Vol. 4, and Ozzy happened to overhear what he was doing. “I hummed a melody over the top,” Ozzy wrote in his memoir, I Am Ozzy, “and Geezer [Butler] wrote these heartbreaking lyrics about the break-up Bill [Ward] was going through with his wife at the time. I thought the song was brilliant from the moment we first recorded it.” It was never released as a single, but it became a fan favorite and the first sign that Ozzy had more range as an artist than the critics suspected. Sabbath played the song only a handful of times in 1972 and 1973 because it’s so wildly different than everything else in their catalog, but in 2003, Ozzy recut it as a duet with his daughter Kelly during the peak of Osbournes mania. —A.G.

Black Sabbath wrote their fifth album, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, in a haunted castle, which explains why Ozzy Osbourne sounds ghoulishly possessed, as he bellows his revenge at all the people who’ve doubted him. Even the sweet, soft-rock parts of the title song find Osbourne railing against liars, all leading to screechy hellfire: “Sabbath bloody Sabbath/Nothing more to do,” he howls. “Living just for dying/Dying just for you.” “That, to me, was the pinnacle of Black Sabbath,” Osbourne said in 2004. “I also discovered, as a singer, the person to harmonize with is yourself — there’s no one who sounds more like you and you.” —K.G.

“I Don’t Know” opens with the sound of a gong recorded in reverse, which makes for a perfectly disorienting intro to a song about confusion. “When people get successful they start becoming backstreet philosophers,” Osbourne once told Planet Rock. “I’m not that kind of guy, I’m a dyslexic fucking rock & roller, so ‘I Don’t Know’ is me saying, ‘Don’t ask me questions, I don’t know.’” “You gotta believe in someone,” he sings over a crisp guitar riff, “Asking who is right/Asking me who to follow/Don’t ask me, I don’t know.” The track opened the singer’s debut solo album, Blizzard of Ozz, and with Osbourne’s Lennon-esque delivery of some especially Lennon-esque lyrics along with a pyrotechnic Randy Rhoads guitar solo, it set the tone perfectly for the rest of his career. —K.G.

All aboooaard! “Crazy Train” was Ozzy Osbourne’s first solo hit and the perfect introduction to his career after Black Sabbath. With a quick-paced, chugging guitar riff by Randy Rhoads and lyrics about feeling Cold War Weltschmerz and crying out for peace by bassist Bob Daisley, Osbourne cast off the heavy boots of lead of his previous band and forged a new kind of metal that was distinctly Eighties. His voice sounds both optimistic and cautious as he sings the opening line, “Crazy, but that’s how it goes,” before he lets it escalate into his trademark keening hysteria for the chorus, “Mental wounds still heeaaling.” “When we did ‘Crazy Train,’ I knew we had something good,” Osbourne once told Planet Rock. “It was a magical time.” —K.G.

Jimmy Page spent much of the Seventies denying rumors that Led Zeppelin’s music was inspired by English satanist Aleister Crowley, but at the dawn of the Eighties, Osbourne went out and called his second solo single “Mr. Crowley.” “I’d read several books about Aleister Crowley,” he wrote in the liner notes to the box set The Ozzman Cometh. “While we were recording the Blizzard of Ozz album there was a pack of tarot cards he had designed lying around the studio. Well, one thing led to another and the song ‘Mr. Crowley’ was born.” Co-written with Randy Rhodes and bassist Bob Daisley, the song reached Number 46 in the U.K. and, after the huge success of “Crazy Train,” solidified the idea that Ozzy the solo artist was more than just a fluke success. He was going to be around for a long time. —A.G.

Ozzy Osbourne was deep in the throes of alcoholism when he began work on Blizzard of Ozz, inspiring bassist-lyricist Bob Daisley to pen a song about the potentially fatal consequence of his addiction. “Wine is fine, but whiskey’s quicker,” he wrote. “Suicide is slow with liqueur/Take a bottle, drown your sorrows/Then it floods away tomorrows.” It was one of the standout tracks on the album, and it’s been a live favorite for decades, but some critics felt the song was somehow pro-suicide. “‘Suicide Solution’ wasn’t written about, ‘Oh, that’s the solution, suicide,’” Osbourne said in 2020. “I was a heavy drinker and I was drinking myself to an early grave. It was suicide solution.” Five years after the song hit, the parents of a teenager who’d died by suicide sued Osbourne, claiming the song was responsible. A judge ultimately dismissed the case. —A.G.

Ozzy never hid his demons, especially his addictions to drugs and alcohol. On “Flying High Again,” he celebrated them. “You can’t see what my eyes see,” he sings urgently about people who judge him. “And you can’t be inside of me … flying high again.” It’s a celebration of tripping out as Ozzy pointed his kaleidoscope inward. “I suddenly realized that when I was a drug addict, I used to write things like ‘Flying High Again,’ ‘Snowblind,’ all this shit,” Osbourne told Spin in 1986. “And the other night, I thought, ‘Fuckin’ ‘ell, I sing one song for it and then straight after, I sing, one against it.’ But the thing is, that’s OK.… It’s part of my life. It’s part of what I am and what I will be.” —K.G.

Ozzy Osbourne always described his musical partnership with Randy Rhoads as one of the most significant of his life. The pair started work on what would become “Diary of a Madman” — their sprawling, gothic tableau of insanity — while sharing a London apartment. Once while Rhoads was taking a classical guitar lesson, Osbourne ambled in and asked what he was playing, as he later told Revolver. “Mozart,” Rhoads said. “Right. We’re nicking it,” Osbourne replied. “We can’t nick Mozart,” Rhoads said. They worked on it, bassist Bob Daisley wrote some lyrics reflecting on a nervous breakdown he’d had at age 16, and Osbourne channeled the words into a Munch-like scream. “By the time Randy had finished messing around with it, there was hardly any Mozart left,” Osbourne recalled. —K.G.

When Ozzy began work on 1983’s Bark at the Moon, he once again had to reestablish himself as an artist without an iconic, beloved guitarist by his side. Randy Rhoads had died in a fluke plane crash the previous year, and Ozzy recruited Jake E. Lee to take on the near-impossible task of replacing him. The first song anyone heard from this new era of Ozzy’s career was the title track to his next album. The song is about a werewolf-like creature that returns from the dead to terrorize a town, essentially making it an “Iron Man” for the Eighties. “The title for this song actually came from a joke I used to tell,” Osbourne wrote in the liner notes for his hits set The Ozzman Cometh, “where the punch line was ‘eat shit and bark at the moon.’” The song is both a showcase for Lee’s virtuosic guitar chops and Ozzy’s ability to turn a metal song into a horror movie of the mind. Lee’s partnership with Ozzy lasted just one more album (1986’s The Ultimate Sin), and this song is the duo at their best. —A.G.

Even though Ozzy Osbourne had been making hits for a decade and a half, he considered “Shot in the Dark,” co-written with bassist Phil Soussan, his first. The track, which was his first to make Billboard’s pop chart and dominated MTV with its fantasy video about possession, sports a tense guitar line over which Osbourne sings about being an ambivalent hitman. “Paid for the kill, but it doesn’t seem right,” he sings, “Something there I can’t believe in.” But its cutting chorus — “Just a shot in the daaark” — made it a hit. “I couldn’t believe Ozzy Osbourne with a hit single,” he wrote in the liner notes to The Ozzman Cometh. “I laugh so much every time I see the video for this song. I look like a tattooed truck driver in a sequined dress.” —K.G.

Lita Ford’s first concert was seeing Black Sabbath at age 13 in 1971. Nearly two decades later, after she established herself with the Runaways and as a solo artist, she found herself jamming and getting drunk with Sabbath’s lead singer and his wife at her new house. “There was a little side room with a guitar and keyboard and we started messing around, singing and playing, and we wrote ‘Close My Eyes Forever,’” she once recalled. The song features Ford’s spidery guitar playing, and the two artists share vocals about contemplating love and eternity. “Next thing I know the sun was coming up,” she recalled. “I looked at him and I went ‘Uh-oh, we’re in trouble.’ Sharon had been waiting all night.… [But] then we had this hit song.” It peaked at Number Eight on Billboard’s pop chart. —K.G.

“Crazy Train” may be Ozzy Osbourne’s signature post-Sabbath song, but his 1991 power ballad “Mama, I’m Home Coming” is actually the one and only time that one of his solo tunes entered the Top 40. He wrote it with Zakk Wylde and Lemmy Kilmister for his album No More Tears. “Everyone thinks it’s about my mother,” Osbourne told Planet Rock. “But it’s not. I call me wife, Sharon, Mama.… I had the idea for this and [Lemmy] wrote the lyrics in about three hours.” The song became a mainstay on MTV and helped Osbourne win over an entirely new audience. It remained a key part of his live show for years, and when Sharon was going through her cancer battle in the early 2000s, he had a hard time getting through it every night without sobbing.  —A.G.

Ozzy Osbourne always sounded best when he was being himself, and few songs were as personally Ozzy as “I Don’t Want to Change the World” (even if Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister wrote the lyrics). The track perfectly captured Osbourne’s defiance and sense of humor at the same time. “Tell me I’m a sinner, I’ve got news for you,” he sneers at one point. “I spoke to God this morning, and he don’t like you.” “This song’s meaning is self-explanatory, in respect that lines like, ‘Tell me I’m a sinner, I got news for you,’ well, it’s kind of a spoof on me, you know,” Osbourne wrote in the liner notes for The Ozzman Cometh. Thanks to Zakk Wylde’s buoyant guitar riffs and a knockout chorus, the song became a set-list staple for Osbourne, and the performance captured on his Live & Loud album later won him a Grammy. —K.G.

The Nineties were a brutal time for nearly every metal act of decades past. Heavyweights like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and even Black Sabbath simply didn’t know how to adapt to the era of grunge. Ozzy Osbourne was the lone exception. He kicked off the decade with No More Tears, his second collaboration with guitarist Zakk Wylde. The title track grew out of a jam session between Wylde and the rest of Osbourne’s band from the era, and they eventually fleshed it out into a six-minute, multipart epic that could almost be labeled prog-metal. “[Producer] John Purdell wrote the lyrics and I came up with the melody line,” Osbourne told Planet Rock. “It brought me into the Nineties.” —A.G.

Amid all of life’s contradictions, all Ozzy Osbourne wanted was stability — and that’s the idea behind “I Just Want You.” “This is my favorite song from Ozzmosis,” Osbourne wrote in the Ozzman Cometh liner notes. “[Songwriter Jim Vallance and I] came up with these incredible lines: ‘There are no impossible dreams, there are no invisible seams.’ And after all those incredible things said in the song, the one line, ‘I don’t ask much, I just want you,’ seemed to be a nice way to sum it all up.” But it’s the song’s urgent bridge — on which Osbourne sings, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired/I used to go to bed so high and wired” — where the song’s real honesty comes through. —K.G.

“People say [‘Dreamer’ is] like Ozzy’s ‘Imagine,’ and I take that as a compliment,” Osbourne once said. Thanks to a gentle piano line and George Martin-esque orchestrations, Osbourne lived out all his fantasies of becoming a member of his favorite band, the Beatles. On the track, he sings about the fate of the environment and his hope for the future, leading to a schmaltzy chorus: “I’m just a dreamer/I dream my life away/I’m just a dreamer/Who dreams of better days.” But just like the Beatles at their most syrupy, Osbourne’s voice always sounds sincere. “[The song] lends itself to a bit of hope,” he once said. “It’s very positive.” —K.G.