Changes

Changes was the third and, following Charles Bradley's death in 2017, final studio album released in his lifetime, arriving in 2016 on the Daptone-family imprint Dunham after the singer's late-career emergence as "The Screaming Eagle of Soul." Bradley had spent decades scraping by as a cook, construction worker and James Brown impersonator before Daptone built a recording career around him in his sixties, and this album continues the raw, horn-driven soul sound of his earlier work for the label. Its title track reimagines Black Sabbath's 1972 ballad "Changes" as a slow-building soul confession, a song Bradley had begun recording while his mother Inez was dying in 2013 and which he came to perform as a tribute to her after her death the following year. The record is shaped throughout by that loss and by the long estrangement and late reconciliation between mother and son, giving songs like "Ain't It a Sin" and the title cut an unusually personal, confessional weight within the deep-soul revival Daptone helped lead. Bradley's gritty, lived-in voice and the live-band arrangements of the Menahan Street Band and collaborators drew comparisons to golden-era soul and funk singers while keeping the album distinctly his own. Critics greeted Changes as a high point of the modern soul revival and one of the most affecting records of Bradley's short late-blooming career, and it remains a touchstone of the Daptone catalogue's blend of vintage sound and contemporary songwriting.