So there you have it: we’ve cracked the Sabbath Code, solved a decades-old riddle and uncovered hidden dimensions in the understanding of Black Sabbath’s essential catalog. To save you the trouble of learning how to read music notation and/or spending fifteen bucks a pop on the songbooks, I’ve provided a rundown of Sabbath’s mystery songs, along with some pointers to understand exactly where and when they occur on each album.Īs you’ll see, some of these tags make perfect sense, while others seem quite random… the intro riff from Lord Of This World gets a title, but the intro riff from Under the Sun doesn’t?īut again, the band only needed to choose two or three sections to name in order to reach that magic number of ten titles per record. While the titles and their sequencing on the early Warner Brothers record labels provided clues, understanding exactly where these ‘songs’ reside is a futile exercise… unless you can read music. Through the precise language of music notation, the Hal Leonard songbooks express these delineations explicitly, marking exactly where all of these ‘songs’ begin, end, and in some cases, reprise. Where does The Elegy end and After Forever begin? Hal Leonard Publishing, the music notation juggernaut, produced ‘easy guitar’ songbooks that were published concurrently with each of the Sab’s first five albums, and are still in print today.Īll of our phantom songs are included in these books, each of which provides ultimate confirmation of exactly where these musical mysteries reside. So: Extra song titles were added to each of Sabbath’s first five US releases to satisfy a stateside publishing deal. Ward was likely referring to their US publishing deal, as each Sabbath album that had less than ten titles listed on the UK version contained ten or more titles when released in the US.įor confirmation that these ‘extra’ titles were added after the albums were recorded, one only need to check out the handwritten track notes on the original tape boxes for the Sab’s first three albums (reproduced in Sanctuary’s 2009 CD reissues), which indicated that these titles were not in use during the recording sessions. And for all the power and glory in Rainbow Rising and Holy Diver, this was, for heavy metal’s greatest singer, his defining statement.The Warner’s deal for the US afforded the band an opportunity to negotiate a new publishing deal, and more songs = more publishing money, for both band and publisher.īill Ward has himself once responded to an interview question regarding these titles by stating that the band needed a minimum of ten songs per album to satisfy the requirements of their publishing agreement. With this album, Ronnie James Dio made Black Sabbath great again. And that power ran deep throughout the album, from the spine-tingling Die Young through to the monumental finale Lonely Is The World. Children Of The Sea, the first song they wrote together, had an eerie, magical quality. The sprawling title track proved that Tony Iommi, king of riffs, was also a brilliant lead guitarist. The single Neon Knights was their clarion call, fast and brutally heavy, Dio hitting notes that Ozzy could only dream of. With Dio a commanding presence, Sabbath was a band reborn. Heaven And Hell is the best of them, a masterpiece to rival the band’s seminal early 70s work. Ozzy Osbourne is, irrefutably, the definitive Black Sabbath singer, but as Ozzy himself admitted recently, “Sabbath made some great records with Ronnie Dio”. 1) Black Sabbath – Heaven And Hell (Vertigo, 1980)
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