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Forever Changes

Love - Forever Changes Audio CD

A fair review of the Love "Forever Changes" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all Love reviews here, or go back to the Love tabs.

Band: Love
Title: Forever Changes
Rating:

Release Date: 2001-02-20
Media: Audio CD

Tracks: 1: Alone Again Or 2: House Is Not a Motel 3: Andmoreagain 4: Daily Planet 5: Old Man 6: Red Telephone 7: Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale 8: Live and Let Live 9: Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This 10: Bummer in the Summer 11: You Set the Scene 12: Hummingbirds [*][Demo Version] 13: Wonder People (I Do Wonder) [*][Outtake] 14: Alone Again Or [Alternate Mix][*] 15: You Set the Scene [Alternate Mix][*] 16: Your Mind and We Belong Together [Tracking Sessions Highlights][*] 17: Your Mind and We Belong Together [*] 18: Laughing Stock [*]

Just what I need.
The song writer is a very talent man. The music is not light nor the heavy, it is just what I needed.
Recommend this forever changes.

Forever Changes cd
The product was in good shape but it took a while for it to arrive.

Another 60's L.A. Masterpiece
Arthur Lee and band came up with a classic on this recording. This album is essential to anyone that can get the hairs on their arms raised by merely listening to great music. If your music collection includes Forever Changes, The Doors first album, the first album by Spirit, Frank Zappa's Hot Rats, Canned Heat, L. A. surf music and some of the pop music that was being done in Los Angeles in the 60's, then you really don't need anything else. Not when it comes to variety, anyway. All of that talent, diversity of musical styles, personalities, all of it coming out of one city in one decade. It hasn't happened before and it won't happen ever again. The sad part is that the pretender bands that came out of L. A. in the 70's (Eagles, anyone?) reaped all of the profit that should have gone to the 60's bands that laid the groundwork. If you want to listen to real country-rock, don't bother with Eagles. Try Buffalo Springfield or the Byrds. You can't put Love in a category at all. There
is not a wrong note on Forever Changes. If you don't already own this stroke of genius, today is the day to change that forever. Buy it and wear it out. Arthur would appreciate that. RIP Arthur, you were the best. .

love: forever changes
their music is truly representative of the l. re: love - forever changes

after all these years (40!)love's "forever changes" is still relevent lyrically. a. scene back in the day. . . looking past the material concerns of a previous generation and speaking to the brotherhood of man. and those mariachi horns and the flaminco guitar stylings. . . definitely provided the ethnic appeal that set Love apart from other great bands playing our multicultural city in the mid to late sixties. and there were many great bands to be heard, indeed. .

A Perfect Album
I'd heard of neither the album nor the group, and I think I bought it out a desire to prove their editors wrong. I bought this album solely because it was ranked number 40 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 best albums of all time. How could it be so great if I'd never heard of it? It must, I figured, be some hippie dippy sentimental pick foisted on the magazine's editors by Jann Wenner.

I was wrong. If anything, this album deserves a higher ranking. It is an essential document of American music and culture, and its only semblance of a fault is that it was ahead of its time by about two years.

There's a common perception that hippie culture found its peak at Woodstock and started disintegrating soon thereafter, with the Manson murders and the stabbing at Altamont heralding the end of the promise of the Sixties. The argument seems to have a lot going for it; looking at the careers of singer/songwriters, for instance, it seems like Bob Dylan's happy trippy tales and delightful upbeat wordplay were being eclipsed around that time by Neil Young's intense Scorpio musings and dark tales of drug deals gone bad. But this album, recorded in Los Angeles in August and September of 1967, not too far removed in space and time from San Francisco's Summer of Love, gives the lie to that notion. The darkness was always there, waiting to be discovered. Most people hadn't made that journey at that point, but Arthur Lee had; he was a visionary, seeing what the rest of the culture had yet to discover.

This album, his masterwork, sits precariously perched atop a towering mountain of late 60s music; it is an exuberant culmination, but one senses the anxious undertones that would send the band and the culture that spawned it hurtling into an abyss of druggy paranoia in years to come. There is sunshine and love in these tracks; but waiting in the wings, there's a jittery dark fatalism. Arthur Lee says he'll "face each day with a smile," but he also sings of "Sitting on the hillside, watching all the people die," before wistfully noting, "I'll feel much better on the other side. " And later in the same song, over jittery violins, he proclaims: "I don't know if I'm living or if I'm supposed to be. " Dark stuff for 1967, or for any decade: thirty-some years before the Flaming Lips wrote "Do You Realize?", here is Lee singing "This is the only thing that I am sure of, and that's all that lives is gonna die, and there'll always be someone around to wonder why, and for every happy hello there will be goodbye. "

The instrumentation, too, is perfectly calibrated to bring forth both sweet and bitter in equal measure. I've sometimes postulated that people can't like both horns and strings equally, and bands can't do both equally well, but this album (along with Nick Drake's "Bryter Later" and "Boxer" by The National) proved me wrong. Here, excited horns give way to mournful strings articulating an ache that cannot be put into words; and there, the horns get mournful and mariachi-like, and the strings become brittle and exuberant. And all the while, Bryan Maclean's stunningly virtuosic guitar playing darts in and out of the mix, so incendiary and awesome that it can only appear in short spurts, lest it consume all in its path.

So, there you have it: incredible musicianship backing up compelling lyrics. What more could a music fan ask for, in 1967 or any other year? This is, in short, a perfect album.
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You can see a complete list of all Love discography, or go back to the Love tabs. There is also a good guide on how to read guitar tabs here.