The Mountains Goat have just shared “Going Back To California,” a new song about about the 1982 plane crash that killed Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Randy Rhoads. In a lengthy post on his official Tumblr, frontman John Darnielle explains that it comes from an album of songs about Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath that he recorded last year with producer Scott Solter, which “will probably never see formal release.” He’s releasing the track now as a reward for fans donating to the Reproductive Justice League as a part of the national National Abortion Access Bowl-a-Thon. Download the song as a 76.91 MB .wav file here or a 5.06 MB .m4a file here and read Darnielle’s entire post below.

Hey everybody, yesterday one of my teammates from the Reproductive Justice League emailed to see if I’d RT some stuff about the Bowl-a-Thon to raise awareness and funds. I can’t bowl this year I don’t think, my spring schedule is super hectic and I can’t keep track of where I’m supposed to be from one day to the next, but I wanted to help, so I told Twitter I’d finish this acapella tune I wrote last year and give it away for free if we could get the team up to four thousand dollars.

People responded by making our league the #6 fundraisers in the nation, and our team the #1 team on the leaderboard as of this writing. I am immensely grateful. The National Network of Abortion Funds helps people pay for abortions they need but can’t afford. This is important work, in my view. This means a lot to me.

I didn’t get a chance to track the song today — the Mountain Goats, all four us us, were in the basement rehearsing from 10:30 ’til 4:15, we have a tour coming up, gotta get up to speed. But I wrote to Scott Solter and I said, hey man, remember those songs about Ozzy and Black Sabbath we recorded last year, is it cool with you if I give one away? Because I have a whole crop of new songs now, the album of songs about Ozzy is probably gonna cobweb on my hard drive for a while. Scott said “sure” so here — link is in the song title, go ahead and click now — “Going Back to California,” a song about the plane crash that killed Randy Rhoads, which happened right in the middle of a tour.

I used Zippyshare to upload. I know nothing about this program except that a lot of people seem to use it to get songs out there, so there it is.

I’m very fond of these sad songs about Ozzy which will probably never see formal release, and am so happy to give this one a home in the world – I hope you enjoy it; the other song, the acapella-harmonies one, I hope to track on Saturday, but I am a dad to two kids, Saturday mornings can be hard times to get work done so it might be next week. Meanwhile, enjoy!

Credits: guitar and vocals by John Darnielle

driven into tape by Scott Solter

(I uploaded it as a wav, by the way — it’s 80 MB. when I get another minute I’ll convert it to AAC or something and update this post with the link.)

(edit: here’s the AAC version, a scant 5.1 MB!)