Black Label Society release a live video of Ozzy's Song, Zakk Wylde's tribute

Black Label Society have released a live performance video for Ozzy's Song, the track that closed their most recent album Engines of Demolition. The footage is from the first time they played it on stage, in Madison, Wisconsin on 27 March 2026, and it is an uncomfortable thing to watch in the way that only a musician singing about somebody he loved can be.

Zakk Wylde does not usually sing like this. Metal Injection, which posted the video, calls it one of his most tender vocal performances, and the performance makes a case for a range he has spent thirty-five years mostly using in service of riffs.

The relationship behind it started with a demo tape. Wylde sent one in as a twenty-year-old from New Jersey and stepped into the line of Ozzy Osbourne guitarists in 1987, making his recorded debut on No Rest for the Wicked the following year. It was 1991's No More Tears that fixed the partnership in place, built on his pinch harmonics and his leads on the title track and Mama, I'm Coming Home.

He stayed for more than three decades, through Ozzmosis, Down to Earth and Black Rain, and the two kept finding their way back to each other even after Wylde had built Black Label Society into a band of its own. His featured work on Osbourne's 2022 record Patient Number 9 was the last studio meeting of the pair. Wylde has long called Osbourne both his boss and his brother, which is not a figure of speech most sidemen reach for.

After Osbourne's death, Wylde described the texts he had been getting. Osbourne wanted to do it again: "Zakk, let's do another record," he wrote, saying he had loved the more melodic, less pummelling direction Wylde brought when he was deep in his Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd phase during No More Tears. Wylde's answer, by his own account, was to agree to whatever Osbourne wanted.

That album never happened, which is what gives the closing track on Engines of Demolition its weight and what makes a live video from March, filmed before anybody knew it would be a memorial, land differently now than it did at the time.

Wylde has barely stopped working since, touring with both Black Label Society and Zakk Sabbath through the autumn, with dates across Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Idaho, Washington and Oregon into early October. The video is logged with the rest of the metal releases on the release calendar, in a year when the Osbourne estate has generated its own news: Jack Osbourne has said the planned film will play to fans rather than art houses, and Sharon Osbourne has confirmed Ozzfest 2027 is under discussion.