Songfacts®:

• "It's Alright" is one of those moments in the Black Sabbath story where you can almost hear the collective eyebrow of the fanbase twitch. Here was the band that gave us "War Pigs," "Iron Man," and "Paranoid" - the soundtrack to a thousand leather jackets and smoldering amplifiers - suddenly offering up a gentle piano ballad sung not by Ozzy Osbourne, but by drummer Bill Ward.
• The song is on 1976's Technical Ecstasy, Sabbath's seventh album and arguably their most confounding. It was recorded in Miami, where Tony Iommi ended up doing most of the heavy lifting while the rest of the band sunned themselves on the beach. The sessions were tense, the band was fraying, and punk was coming up behind them with a sneer and safety pins. Amid all this, Technical Ecstasy found Sabbath experimenting with synthesizers, polished production, and, in the case of "It's Alright," veering straight into Beatles territory.
• Ward had written the tune years earlier at Field's Farm, a Sabbath hangout. It's a song of acceptance and peace, an almost shocking sentiment from the group that once warned us about "Children Of The Grave."
  
  "We were starting to get a bit thin on ideas," Ward recalled to Uncut magazine. "Oz had come down and we'd go out and have a drink. Ozzy had a song called 'Who Are You?' (recorded on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath) and I had that. Ozzy always liked 'It's Alright,' everybody did, but we never bothered to do anything with it. But we were changing, we were getting older. We were all having kids. So that original source of energy was changing."
• When the opportunity came to record the song, Ward was hesitant, fearing he might offend his famously unpredictable frontman. But Ozzy was all for it. "He's got a great voice, Bill," Ozzy wrote in his autobiography. "I was more than happy for him to do the honors."
• The track is one of only two Black Sabbath songs with Bill Ward on lead vocals; the other is "Swinging The Chain" from 1978's Never Say Die! album. Ward sang "Swinging the Chain" because Ozzy didn't want to record material written during his temporary departure from the band, but "It's Alright" was a deliberate artistic choice supported by all band members.
• At the time, critics didn't quite know what to make of this song, but over the years it's found redemption. Guns N' Roses began covering it in the late '80s (it appears on their Live Era '87–'93 album), and it later popped up in the 2010 film It's Kind of a Funny Story, an apt title for a tune that once baffled metalheads but now feels like one of Sabbath's most human moments.