Ozzy Osbourne’s favorite song

Next October 19th Ozzy Osbourne will be officially inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist for the class of 2024, on the occasion of ceremony to be held at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland, Ohio.

In view of this event, which comes eighteen years after the musician’s first induction into the “rock Olympus” as a member of Black Sabbath, “Metal Hammer” magazine asked some friends and colleagues to indicate their favorite songs from the “Godfather of Darkness”. The special featured artists such as, among others, Rob Trujillo of Metallica, Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine, as well as members of Slayer, Halestorm, Killswitch Engage and Green Lung.

The question was also asked of Ozzy himself, who therefore had to choose your favorite song from your repertoirewhich includes both classics with his historic band such as “Paranoid”, “War pigs” and “Iron man”, as well as well-known solo songs, including “Crazy train”, “Bark at the moon” or “Shot in the dark” .

Osbourne’s choice then fell on one ballad taken from an album that, released in September of 1991just a week before “Nevermind” by Nirvana, in which grunge was taking over the rock scene, still managed to resist the changes of that new scene. The album is “No more tears” and the song, which showcases Ozzy’s more introspective side, is “Mama, I’m coming home“.

“I have a real weakness for ‘Mama, I’m coming home'”, explained Ozzy Osbourne: “I didn’t write the lyrics, Lemmy Kilmister wrote them, but I told him exactly what I meant. But I’ll tell you something: I don’t have an absolute favorite song. People always ask me what my favorite album is, I don’t have one! They are records of fun, chaos or times when I was feeling bad. Each of my albums is a reflection of me, in a specific moment“.

In an interview for “Classic Rock” in 2013, regarding the song he wrote for Ozzy, Lemmy, who passed away in 2015, said: “Ozzy sent me a tape with a song for which he wanted lyrics. I think he I just gave the title. I’m good at that, because that’s how I write songs: I make up a title and then I write the song around it. Later, Ozzy and I were doing interviews together at this festival and a guy asked to him: ‘The song Mama, I’m coming home is the most personal thing you’ve ever written. Was that a big break?’ And Ozzy was like, ‘He wrote that!’.”

In addition to “Mama, I’m coming home”, the album “No more tears” includes another song co-written with the Motörhead frontman, “Hellraiser“, of which a version featuring vocals by both Ozzy and Lemmy was released in 2021.