We knew it was coming, but that doesn’t make it any easier to watch. Imagine what it must have felt like live, in the moment! Black Label Society have not only been talking about their new album Engines of Demolition, which they just released yesterday, but mainly about the sweetly sad tune that closes it out—”Ozzy’s Song.” They made the choice to premiere the single by performing it live, and have now shared the official Justin H. Reich-directed music video for it, that you can watch below.
Of course doing a little something in honor of Ozzy was in the cards for BLS frontman Zakk Wylde, who was Ozzy’s bandmate for basically forever, was bound to happen. As he told São Paulo, Brazil’s 89 FM A Rádio Rock recently, it’s kind of been a longtime in the making. Or, at least, parts of it have been.
“ Yeah, I had the music written ’cause we’d been writing this album for the last three and a half years, almost four years. So, we stockpiled all these songs. And I was real happy with the way the music came out. And then I figured eventually I’ll finish the song. But then after we laid Ozzy to rest, when we got back home, we took a break from Pantera celebration [touring with the reformed Pantera]. I sat in a little library room in our house. I just put the headphones on at about one o’clock in the morning and I was looking at a book of Ozzy and I just wrote the lyrics. And that’s what came out.
“My wife would always be listening to it in the truck, Barbaranne, she’d be, like, ‘Babe, put on Ozzy’s song again.’ So that was pretty much just the working title. It’s just, like, well, it’s Ozzy’s song. So, people would always be asking, like, ‘I wonder since Zakk wrote a song for [late Pantera guitarist] Dimebag [Darrell Abbott],’ and now we sing it for [late Pantera drummer] Vinnie [Paul Abbott] as well, ‘with ‘In This River’, I wonder if Zakk will write a song for Ozzy on the new album.’ So, it’s only fitting. We just called it ‘Ozzy’s Song’. So that’s how we ended up with ‘Ozzy’s Song’.”
Blow your nose and pour some out for a real one, y’all.