Boom-bib-bip, boom-bip-bip, yeah!! They were the first REAL garage band with a black front man. Talk about racial diversity in the 60's. Unheard of in those days when it came to psychedelic rock. I was all of seven when my teenaged brothers brought that music into the house much to our dads disdain. What a fantastic flashback, Howard, thanks again.
Thanks so much, Gina. I love that image of your brothers bringing this music into the house and your dad looking on in disdain — that feels exactly like the right setting for Love to arrive in.
They really were ahead of the curve: raw, strange, diverse, volatile, and completely their own thing. That is part of what still makes Forever Changes feel so alive to me. It is not just a record from 1967; it still sounds like a flashback, a warning, and a revelation all at once.
Let me start, Howard, by saying that I was very much looking forward to your piece on this most wonderful album. I discovered it while I was responsible for catalogue at Warner Music Belgium in the early 2000s, when I released the double CD version of it. Part of my job was presenting upcoming releases to the sales team during our weekly meetings, usually in both Dutch and French, so I always had to come prepared. That preparation inevitably started with listening to the album.
At the time, I didn’t know the band or the record at all. What happened next was one of those rare musical revelations: I discovered an album that became my favorite release of that year and has remained one of my all-time favorite albums ever since.
You put it beautifully when you write that “David Angel’s orchestrations are central to this. They do not simply decorate Arthur Lee’s songs. They create a counterforce. The strings and horns often behave as if form, proportion, and continuity remain available.” That is exactly what drew me in and kept me there. The orchestrations are extraordinary.
I have always found it incredible that an album of this quality never became the universally recognized standard it deserved to be. But at the same time, there is something special about some of your greatest loves remaining slightly obscure. It makes the treasure of loving them feel even more personal and meaningful.
Your piece did a wonderful job of explaining the intricacies of the album, and I know my next listen will be even deeper because of it. I also loved the way you connected the album to your own life and to the moment you first heard it.
You are a brilliant writer, and this write-up is one of your very best. Thanks so much for sharing it.
Thank you so much — this really means a great deal.
I love that your discovery came through preparing a catalogue release. That feels very fitting for Forever Changes: an album that can arrive through professional obligation and suddenly become deeply personal.
And yes, David Angel’s orchestrations are central to why it still works so powerfully. They give the record shape and continuity while Arthur Lee’s songs keep pulling everything toward uncertainty and fracture.
I also completely agree about its slightly obscure status. Part of me wants it to be universally recognized as the masterpiece it is, but another part understands that its hidden-treasure quality makes the attachment feel even more personal.
Really grateful you read it so closely, and I’m thrilled it may deepen your next listen.
Superb analysis, made more acute by the imbedded memoir. Forever Changes collapses Time, and requests listening from many angles. If I believed in lists, it would be near the top of all of them
Terrific piece. I mean this in the usual sense, but there's something else: your narrative voice.
I've noticed you are giving us two voices here: the one from 1994 (confused, unsure, disillusioned perhaps, at a crossroads, clearly needing some guidance, yearning for certainty), and another voice, the voice that speaks from the lived and learned experience.
And you let them coexist. One can clearly tell they are two different voices, but you let them live as one.
How you managed to craft and sustain this dual narrative voice throughout the piece is incredible. In its own right, because anyone who has ever written something will agree with me this is one of the hardest and trickiest challenges (if not the hardest and trickiest challenge) for any writer in any style or genre. But the fact that you did it HERE, of all places, in this piece, where you are precisely talking about a record with two narratives, two contrasting signals that don't sit easily or comfortably with each other... a record where "the music opened the windows while the words checked the locks".
I mean, really? Wow. Just wow.
One can see, on the one hand, that young man, back in 1994: I don't have a clear path. What do I tell people now? What reason should I give for my change of plans? Why am I not reading physics yet? Why the limbo? Why the previous foray into electronics? How do I make the narrative make sense without losing face?
And one can also see the man of today who understands that intelligence is important but not everything, that doors opening is only the beginning, that wisdom and experience do not remove uncertainty but simply teach us how to tolerate it better.
At least twice you said in the piece that the time spent studying electronics wasn't wasted, almost as if you were (still) trying to convince yourself. This was so masterfully done. You were clearly showing us in the rest of the piece that you perfectly understood that it was definitely not wasted, and yet, you were still letting that younger voice of yours appear when it needed to. Almost as if in reading your analysis of the album one could feel what the album made you feel. I am not sure whether this was deliberate or by "accident" (is there such a thing as an accident in writing?), but in either case, it was masterful.
How does one carry that level of intelligence AND soundness of mind? Because intelligence like yours needs a level of abstraction that usually comes with a certain disconnect from reality, a certain level of insanity, and yet, your observations about the world unequivocally show a level of awareness and discernment which is simply not possible to master without having your head on your shoulders and your feet firmly on the ground.
When reading your work, I often stop and ask myself: "Is this man real?"
Yes, you are real. And we are incredibly lucky to have you.
This was a hard piece to write and rewrite because the memories ran so deep, and because I was trying to be honest about that younger version of myself without either dismissing him or overexplaining him from the safety of the present day.
Your observation about the two voices means a great deal to me, because that was very much the emotional tension of the piece. The younger man was still trying to make sense of uncertainty, failure, direction, and identity, while the older version of me can now see that none of that time was wasted — even if it didn’t feel that way then.
I don’t know that I consciously set out to make those voices coexist, but I think the album brought that out of me. That is part of what made it so powerful to write about.
Thank you for reading it so closely, and for responding with such generosity and insight. Comments like this make the long hours of writing and rewriting feel deeply worthwhile.
It's funny, but I'd never thought about the meanings of the title Forever Changes, only accepted it as 'the title of a great album ', so thank you for that insight as well.
In my perhaps/one day/soon to be published essay on music I talk a little bit about the importance (to me at least) of ambiguity, disjunction, obfuscation or opacity, in song writing.
Thank you so much for reading it so closely, AJ. That really means a lot.
I think you’re absolutely right about ambiguity, disjunction, opacity, and obfuscation in songwriting. Some of the most powerful music does not explain itself cleanly; it leaves space for the listener to enter, question, misread, return, and slowly build a personal relationship with it.
That was a huge part of what drew me back into Forever Changes. It is beautiful, but it never fully settles. The title itself almost feels like a warning and a promise at the same time.
I’ll very much look forward to reading your essay when it appears.
Man, I just don't get it. Try as I might - and I've been trying for a few decades - Forever Changes, and Love generally - just don't do it for me. I know it's an important album, I know it's a classic and yet, it doesn't move me like Phaedra or Script for a Jester's Tear, or Powerage or 5000 other albums I own.
But, now at age 59 and with your beautifully written analysis, I'll try again. Maybe the 33rd time is the charm?
Bill, I completely get that. Some records can be important, brilliant, even historically essential, and still not hit the emotional switch for us.
And honestly, Phaedra, Script for a Jester’s Tear, and Powerage are all very strong counterexamples — records that hit in very different but very direct ways.
I’m honored that the essay made you willing to give Forever Changes another go. Maybe the 33rd time will be the charm, but if not, that’s fine too. Some albums find us, some don’t, and sometimes the gap between respect and love is exactly where the interesting conversation starts.
I will say that the song Seven and Seven Is, not on Forever Changes but by Love, was something I first heard in '81 or '82 when Alice Cooper covered it on his Special Forces album (during his weird, wilderness years of almost new wave exploration, and allegedly severe alcohol issues). I noted then it was a song by a guy named Arthur Lee and rather quickly, in those pre-internet years, figured out he was in Love. My first attempt at Forever Changes was maybe a year later with a bargain used cooy of the LP. I was definitely not ready then and, may never be, but I will give it that oromised 33rd go. I do like Seven & Seven Is - both the original and Alice Cooper's....which I did hear first.
I’ll preface this by saying my monthly newsletter is called The Red Telephone. A nod to both the actual red telephone and this song, although the song offers more structural complexity than a piece of red Bakelite.
I too began adult life studying electronic and electrical engineering. “Enhancing” my career with further studies in lighting and design, but ultimately drifting towards the arts, so I recognise many of the forces you describe.
My Forever Changes essay sits on the draft pile, so I’ll try not to regurgitate too much of it here, and say that your recognition of the difference between sloganeering and reality hits hard. As you say, it’s not that money isn’t important, but there is more to life. The album has slogans painted all over it, but they’re more like Barbara Kruger artworks than rallying cries. The album itself is not a slogan at all, but something truly three dimensional.
I love how you move through the conflicting forces at play, which prompted another engineering thought. The most beautiful architecture requires the most complex resolution of structural forces. As for strange connections, I was thinking yesterday it would be nice to pick up an album and see myself credited on the back. Then I remembered, that had happened. Of course they spelt my name wrong, Gaudi, like the architect. Forever Changes, the Sagrada Familia of music?
Finally, another one of my deep influences that has come back into sight in recent days is George Melly’s Revolt into Style. It was introduced to me by my old friend, Hugh, and we spent many an afternoon talking about this album in great detail.
Nothing lasts, forever changes, but as always, Howard, your essays are three dimensional and you resolve the complex forces in a way the ensures they will stand.
I love the idea of Forever Changes as the Sagrada Familia of music. That feels exactly right: beautiful because the tensions are not hidden, but resolved into something that somehow stands. The album is full of competing forces — slogans, fear, humor, fragility, architecture, collapse — yet it never reduces itself to a simple statement.
I also really appreciate the engineering connection. That shift from technical study toward the arts is something I recognize deeply. Maybe that is why records like this matter so much to both of us: they are not just emotional objects, but constructed systems under pressure.
And yes — “nothing lasts, forever changes” may be the whole thing in miniature.
I’ll look forward to your own Forever Changes essay when it emerges from the draft pile.
Thanks Howard, I really appreciate these discussions. Most of my music writing is on Medium, and I was hoping my Substack would be a bit more in sync with it now, but it's been a slow process. Soon, I hope!
This is a brilliant review of a seminal album. I was a young teenager living in California in the late 1960’s. My first exposure to Love was their rendition of Bacharach and David’s My Little Red Book a track on their debut album…one that makes it impossible to stand still when listening to it. I never heard Forever Changes or any of their other albums until a couple of decades later. As you mention, hearing this album now, it is important to understand what was going on in California in those years. I was a little too young to completely understand it at the time, but even as early as 1967, the Summer of Love was starting to reveal an ugly side and Arthur Lee was somewhat of a visionary in expressing his read on where the future was going. He eventually had a hard time adjusting to how things changed. I believe it reached a point where he rarely left the house because he wanted to no part of the ugliness, which included bad drugs and Charles Manson wandering in and out of daily lives in that music scene. There is a reason why Legendary Arthur Lee has seemingly become his full name these days. Enjoyed reading your take on this masterpiece.
Jeff, thank you so much for this. I really appreciate it.
That California perspective is invaluable, especially from someone who was close enough to feel the atmosphere of the time, even if still too young to fully decode it. That is part of what fascinates me about Forever Changes: it sits right at the point where the dream is still visible, but the fracture lines are already opening underneath it.
I also love that your first doorway into Love was “My Little Red Book.” That track has such unstoppable garage-band energy, but by the time you reach Forever Changes, Arthur Lee seems to be seeing several miles further down the road than most people around him.
“Legendary Arthur Lee” does feel right now. Not because the mythology replaces the man, but because the record still sounds like someone catching the future before everyone else realized it had arrived. Really pleased you enjoyed the essay.
Thanks for including 'Laurel Canyon' in your bibliography as well as two books essential for understanding how in the mid-1960s the L.A. music scene evolved from flailing folkies to a world-beating aesthetic powerhouse: Elektra founder Jac Holzman's memoir and Domenic Priore's 'Riot on the Sunset Strip', both of which illuminate the light and shade of that moment captured no where else. Your essay makes perfect sense of the contradiction between Love's captivating music and its provocative lyrical subtext--reading the titles alone, it's evident the immense influence Love and Arthur Lee had on Prince a decade and change later. Listening to this album when you did clearly altered the course of your life, or at least your understanding of what it could (should?) become...
Thank you so much — that means a great deal, especially coming from legend like yourself Michael.
Your work was essential background for this piece because Forever Changes only fully makes sense when placed inside that wider L.A. ecosystem: folk, garage rock, psychedelia, ambition, collapse, light, and shade all occupying the same space. Jac Holzman and Domenic Priore were also invaluable in helping me understand the machinery around the moment, not just the mythology.
I love your point about Prince. Once you start looking at Love through that lens — the titles, the tension, the theatricality, the refusal to sit inside one genre — the connection becomes hard to unsee.
And yes, this album did alter something for me. Maybe not the entire course of my life, but certainly my understanding of what music could hold: beauty, fear, contradiction, identity, and warning, all at once. That is why it still feels inexhaustible.
Howard, I really love that you brought your own changes into this essay, holding the album up as an imperfect mirror through which to view your own path and self and the way they aligned with or diverged from you. And what you capture beautifully is the album's own dichotomies, specifically the surface beauty and the garbled interior behind it. But you also capture not just how the album changes with age, but in the immediate experience. That occurs both with the way that You Set the Scene keeps setting a new scene but also with the way you process that and other elements of the album. I hope you continue to bring more of your own experiences into your read of these albums, but also to work through the ways that their narratives can be understood, even if those narratives are ones fueled by estrangement from the scenes they set.
Emm, thank you so much. I love the idea of the album as an imperfect mirror, because Forever Changes never reflects cleanly. It distorts, unsettles, and keeps changing even as you listen.
And yes, you can definitely expect more personal experience in pieces like this, especially with albums that were genuinely influential in my life. Sometimes the only honest way to understand a record is to admit where it found you, and what it changed once it got there.
Boom-bib-bip, boom-bip-bip, yeah!! They were the first REAL garage band with a black front man. Talk about racial diversity in the 60's. Unheard of in those days when it came to psychedelic rock. I was all of seven when my teenaged brothers brought that music into the house much to our dads disdain. What a fantastic flashback, Howard, thanks again.
Thanks so much, Gina. I love that image of your brothers bringing this music into the house and your dad looking on in disdain — that feels exactly like the right setting for Love to arrive in.
They really were ahead of the curve: raw, strange, diverse, volatile, and completely their own thing. That is part of what still makes Forever Changes feel so alive to me. It is not just a record from 1967; it still sounds like a flashback, a warning, and a revelation all at once.
Really pleased this brought those memories back.
Let me start, Howard, by saying that I was very much looking forward to your piece on this most wonderful album. I discovered it while I was responsible for catalogue at Warner Music Belgium in the early 2000s, when I released the double CD version of it. Part of my job was presenting upcoming releases to the sales team during our weekly meetings, usually in both Dutch and French, so I always had to come prepared. That preparation inevitably started with listening to the album.
At the time, I didn’t know the band or the record at all. What happened next was one of those rare musical revelations: I discovered an album that became my favorite release of that year and has remained one of my all-time favorite albums ever since.
You put it beautifully when you write that “David Angel’s orchestrations are central to this. They do not simply decorate Arthur Lee’s songs. They create a counterforce. The strings and horns often behave as if form, proportion, and continuity remain available.” That is exactly what drew me in and kept me there. The orchestrations are extraordinary.
I have always found it incredible that an album of this quality never became the universally recognized standard it deserved to be. But at the same time, there is something special about some of your greatest loves remaining slightly obscure. It makes the treasure of loving them feel even more personal and meaningful.
Your piece did a wonderful job of explaining the intricacies of the album, and I know my next listen will be even deeper because of it. I also loved the way you connected the album to your own life and to the moment you first heard it.
You are a brilliant writer, and this write-up is one of your very best. Thanks so much for sharing it.
Thank you so much — this really means a great deal.
I love that your discovery came through preparing a catalogue release. That feels very fitting for Forever Changes: an album that can arrive through professional obligation and suddenly become deeply personal.
And yes, David Angel’s orchestrations are central to why it still works so powerfully. They give the record shape and continuity while Arthur Lee’s songs keep pulling everything toward uncertainty and fracture.
I also completely agree about its slightly obscure status. Part of me wants it to be universally recognized as the masterpiece it is, but another part understands that its hidden-treasure quality makes the attachment feel even more personal.
Really grateful you read it so closely, and I’m thrilled it may deepen your next listen.
a gorgeous album
Superb analysis, made more acute by the imbedded memoir. Forever Changes collapses Time, and requests listening from many angles. If I believed in lists, it would be near the top of all of them
Terrific piece. I mean this in the usual sense, but there's something else: your narrative voice.
I've noticed you are giving us two voices here: the one from 1994 (confused, unsure, disillusioned perhaps, at a crossroads, clearly needing some guidance, yearning for certainty), and another voice, the voice that speaks from the lived and learned experience.
And you let them coexist. One can clearly tell they are two different voices, but you let them live as one.
How you managed to craft and sustain this dual narrative voice throughout the piece is incredible. In its own right, because anyone who has ever written something will agree with me this is one of the hardest and trickiest challenges (if not the hardest and trickiest challenge) for any writer in any style or genre. But the fact that you did it HERE, of all places, in this piece, where you are precisely talking about a record with two narratives, two contrasting signals that don't sit easily or comfortably with each other... a record where "the music opened the windows while the words checked the locks".
I mean, really? Wow. Just wow.
One can see, on the one hand, that young man, back in 1994: I don't have a clear path. What do I tell people now? What reason should I give for my change of plans? Why am I not reading physics yet? Why the limbo? Why the previous foray into electronics? How do I make the narrative make sense without losing face?
And one can also see the man of today who understands that intelligence is important but not everything, that doors opening is only the beginning, that wisdom and experience do not remove uncertainty but simply teach us how to tolerate it better.
At least twice you said in the piece that the time spent studying electronics wasn't wasted, almost as if you were (still) trying to convince yourself. This was so masterfully done. You were clearly showing us in the rest of the piece that you perfectly understood that it was definitely not wasted, and yet, you were still letting that younger voice of yours appear when it needed to. Almost as if in reading your analysis of the album one could feel what the album made you feel. I am not sure whether this was deliberate or by "accident" (is there such a thing as an accident in writing?), but in either case, it was masterful.
How does one carry that level of intelligence AND soundness of mind? Because intelligence like yours needs a level of abstraction that usually comes with a certain disconnect from reality, a certain level of insanity, and yet, your observations about the world unequivocally show a level of awareness and discernment which is simply not possible to master without having your head on your shoulders and your feet firmly on the ground.
When reading your work, I often stop and ask myself: "Is this man real?"
Yes, you are real. And we are incredibly lucky to have you.
Thank you so much for this, Andres. Truly.
This was a hard piece to write and rewrite because the memories ran so deep, and because I was trying to be honest about that younger version of myself without either dismissing him or overexplaining him from the safety of the present day.
Your observation about the two voices means a great deal to me, because that was very much the emotional tension of the piece. The younger man was still trying to make sense of uncertainty, failure, direction, and identity, while the older version of me can now see that none of that time was wasted — even if it didn’t feel that way then.
I don’t know that I consciously set out to make those voices coexist, but I think the album brought that out of me. That is part of what made it so powerful to write about.
Thank you for reading it so closely, and for responding with such generosity and insight. Comments like this make the long hours of writing and rewriting feel deeply worthwhile.
Another great essay Howard, for which thank you!
It's funny, but I'd never thought about the meanings of the title Forever Changes, only accepted it as 'the title of a great album ', so thank you for that insight as well.
In my perhaps/one day/soon to be published essay on music I talk a little bit about the importance (to me at least) of ambiguity, disjunction, obfuscation or opacity, in song writing.
Look forward to your next.
Thank you so much for reading it so closely, AJ. That really means a lot.
I think you’re absolutely right about ambiguity, disjunction, opacity, and obfuscation in songwriting. Some of the most powerful music does not explain itself cleanly; it leaves space for the listener to enter, question, misread, return, and slowly build a personal relationship with it.
That was a huge part of what drew me back into Forever Changes. It is beautiful, but it never fully settles. The title itself almost feels like a warning and a promise at the same time.
I’ll very much look forward to reading your essay when it appears.
Man, I just don't get it. Try as I might - and I've been trying for a few decades - Forever Changes, and Love generally - just don't do it for me. I know it's an important album, I know it's a classic and yet, it doesn't move me like Phaedra or Script for a Jester's Tear, or Powerage or 5000 other albums I own.
But, now at age 59 and with your beautifully written analysis, I'll try again. Maybe the 33rd time is the charm?
Bill, I completely get that. Some records can be important, brilliant, even historically essential, and still not hit the emotional switch for us.
And honestly, Phaedra, Script for a Jester’s Tear, and Powerage are all very strong counterexamples — records that hit in very different but very direct ways.
I’m honored that the essay made you willing to give Forever Changes another go. Maybe the 33rd time will be the charm, but if not, that’s fine too. Some albums find us, some don’t, and sometimes the gap between respect and love is exactly where the interesting conversation starts.
I will say that the song Seven and Seven Is, not on Forever Changes but by Love, was something I first heard in '81 or '82 when Alice Cooper covered it on his Special Forces album (during his weird, wilderness years of almost new wave exploration, and allegedly severe alcohol issues). I noted then it was a song by a guy named Arthur Lee and rather quickly, in those pre-internet years, figured out he was in Love. My first attempt at Forever Changes was maybe a year later with a bargain used cooy of the LP. I was definitely not ready then and, may never be, but I will give it that oromised 33rd go. I do like Seven & Seven Is - both the original and Alice Cooper's....which I did hear first.
I found Love through Calexico covering Alone Again Or. I’ve got a tee shirt now and a sticker of Forever Changes. Great Band!!
I’ll preface this by saying my monthly newsletter is called The Red Telephone. A nod to both the actual red telephone and this song, although the song offers more structural complexity than a piece of red Bakelite.
I too began adult life studying electronic and electrical engineering. “Enhancing” my career with further studies in lighting and design, but ultimately drifting towards the arts, so I recognise many of the forces you describe.
My Forever Changes essay sits on the draft pile, so I’ll try not to regurgitate too much of it here, and say that your recognition of the difference between sloganeering and reality hits hard. As you say, it’s not that money isn’t important, but there is more to life. The album has slogans painted all over it, but they’re more like Barbara Kruger artworks than rallying cries. The album itself is not a slogan at all, but something truly three dimensional.
I love how you move through the conflicting forces at play, which prompted another engineering thought. The most beautiful architecture requires the most complex resolution of structural forces. As for strange connections, I was thinking yesterday it would be nice to pick up an album and see myself credited on the back. Then I remembered, that had happened. Of course they spelt my name wrong, Gaudi, like the architect. Forever Changes, the Sagrada Familia of music?
Finally, another one of my deep influences that has come back into sight in recent days is George Melly’s Revolt into Style. It was introduced to me by my old friend, Hugh, and we spent many an afternoon talking about this album in great detail.
Nothing lasts, forever changes, but as always, Howard, your essays are three dimensional and you resolve the complex forces in a way the ensures they will stand.
Robert, this is a wonderful response — thank you.
I love the idea of Forever Changes as the Sagrada Familia of music. That feels exactly right: beautiful because the tensions are not hidden, but resolved into something that somehow stands. The album is full of competing forces — slogans, fear, humor, fragility, architecture, collapse — yet it never reduces itself to a simple statement.
I also really appreciate the engineering connection. That shift from technical study toward the arts is something I recognize deeply. Maybe that is why records like this matter so much to both of us: they are not just emotional objects, but constructed systems under pressure.
And yes — “nothing lasts, forever changes” may be the whole thing in miniature.
I’ll look forward to your own Forever Changes essay when it emerges from the draft pile.
Thanks Howard, I really appreciate these discussions. Most of my music writing is on Medium, and I was hoping my Substack would be a bit more in sync with it now, but it's been a slow process. Soon, I hope!
This is a brilliant review of a seminal album. I was a young teenager living in California in the late 1960’s. My first exposure to Love was their rendition of Bacharach and David’s My Little Red Book a track on their debut album…one that makes it impossible to stand still when listening to it. I never heard Forever Changes or any of their other albums until a couple of decades later. As you mention, hearing this album now, it is important to understand what was going on in California in those years. I was a little too young to completely understand it at the time, but even as early as 1967, the Summer of Love was starting to reveal an ugly side and Arthur Lee was somewhat of a visionary in expressing his read on where the future was going. He eventually had a hard time adjusting to how things changed. I believe it reached a point where he rarely left the house because he wanted to no part of the ugliness, which included bad drugs and Charles Manson wandering in and out of daily lives in that music scene. There is a reason why Legendary Arthur Lee has seemingly become his full name these days. Enjoyed reading your take on this masterpiece.
Jeff, thank you so much for this. I really appreciate it.
That California perspective is invaluable, especially from someone who was close enough to feel the atmosphere of the time, even if still too young to fully decode it. That is part of what fascinates me about Forever Changes: it sits right at the point where the dream is still visible, but the fracture lines are already opening underneath it.
I also love that your first doorway into Love was “My Little Red Book.” That track has such unstoppable garage-band energy, but by the time you reach Forever Changes, Arthur Lee seems to be seeing several miles further down the road than most people around him.
“Legendary Arthur Lee” does feel right now. Not because the mythology replaces the man, but because the record still sounds like someone catching the future before everyone else realized it had arrived. Really pleased you enjoyed the essay.
Thanks for including 'Laurel Canyon' in your bibliography as well as two books essential for understanding how in the mid-1960s the L.A. music scene evolved from flailing folkies to a world-beating aesthetic powerhouse: Elektra founder Jac Holzman's memoir and Domenic Priore's 'Riot on the Sunset Strip', both of which illuminate the light and shade of that moment captured no where else. Your essay makes perfect sense of the contradiction between Love's captivating music and its provocative lyrical subtext--reading the titles alone, it's evident the immense influence Love and Arthur Lee had on Prince a decade and change later. Listening to this album when you did clearly altered the course of your life, or at least your understanding of what it could (should?) become...
Thank you so much — that means a great deal, especially coming from legend like yourself Michael.
Your work was essential background for this piece because Forever Changes only fully makes sense when placed inside that wider L.A. ecosystem: folk, garage rock, psychedelia, ambition, collapse, light, and shade all occupying the same space. Jac Holzman and Domenic Priore were also invaluable in helping me understand the machinery around the moment, not just the mythology.
I love your point about Prince. Once you start looking at Love through that lens — the titles, the tension, the theatricality, the refusal to sit inside one genre — the connection becomes hard to unsee.
And yes, this album did alter something for me. Maybe not the entire course of my life, but certainly my understanding of what music could hold: beauty, fear, contradiction, identity, and warning, all at once. That is why it still feels inexhaustible.
Howard, I really love that you brought your own changes into this essay, holding the album up as an imperfect mirror through which to view your own path and self and the way they aligned with or diverged from you. And what you capture beautifully is the album's own dichotomies, specifically the surface beauty and the garbled interior behind it. But you also capture not just how the album changes with age, but in the immediate experience. That occurs both with the way that You Set the Scene keeps setting a new scene but also with the way you process that and other elements of the album. I hope you continue to bring more of your own experiences into your read of these albums, but also to work through the ways that their narratives can be understood, even if those narratives are ones fueled by estrangement from the scenes they set.
Emm, thank you so much. I love the idea of the album as an imperfect mirror, because Forever Changes never reflects cleanly. It distorts, unsettles, and keeps changing even as you listen.
And yes, you can definitely expect more personal experience in pieces like this, especially with albums that were genuinely influential in my life. Sometimes the only honest way to understand a record is to admit where it found you, and what it changed once it got there.