(Dis)Covering “Things Have Changed”

I’ve been adding a lot of Dylan songs to my sets, almost a whole Dylan set, motivating me to get a set of my very own compositions on my iPad for live performance. When I started building backtracks for this time-machine hired-musician project I call Euphemism’s Prism, a remnant of the lockdown; when I had to learn to divvy up the music with my other artificial selves, musical descendants of the blonde boy, child is father, I turned immediately to Mr. Tambourine Man with my desire to cast a dancing spell, then to Just Like a Woman where Queen Mary is a friend.

I recall vividly sitting on my drummer’s throne just after the incredible Bose got here, ready to render Mr. Tambourine Man live for the first time. My harmony tracks were balanced and reasonably in tune, the guitars were aligned, as were the stars I guess, because I felt a shiver in my body when I started singing the jingle jangle chorus, maybe like the shiver Dylan said he felt the time he ran into Buddy Holly face to face at a concert, made eye contact, shortly before Holly’s death. I had to stop playing in the middle of the song because I started crying.

After I got the obvious early Dylan tunes in performance form, I started digging deeper for songs I had heard in the bygones and even the heretofores but had not internalized, songs like Senor, Man in the Long Black Coat, Crossing the Rubicon. I’d known about, but forgotten about, Dylan’s Academy Award for the song when I stumbled upon Things Have Changed, a YouTube accident, and heard it brand new to me no more than a week ago. I wanted it on my iPad the first time I heard it—the only other song that hit me hard like that the first time I heard it is Sailing to Philadelphia (Mark Knopfler).

Getting to the heart of Things Have Changed was for me a bit like reading Faulkner. At entry, the artistry and complexity of such compositions signal a down shift, a mountainous road, patience, yet the feeling and draw, the certainty of reward, are compelling enough to launch a protocol. My first job was to figure out the chord structure of the song, a job usually less difficult then I at first think it’s going to be (don’t trust everything you see online if it hurts your ears), in this case a minor blues with a shift to the relative major—G minor to E flat—and then back to the minor. He separates the verses with an eight bar minor interlude sans the tempting secondary dominant seventh on steroids (implied in some interludes). It’s really a tasty structure to carry the story of this worried man with a worried mind and a female assassin on his lap getting drunk.

Groove is core. This one makes you undulate unconsciously, even if you don’t feel like doing the work of figuring out what the hell these words mean. At a basic level, that’s plenty—a dancing spell for sure. Dylan is masterful at timing the pulse of his words precisely around the groove so that even just as meaningless syllables they are percussive—and musically significant. So it’s important to examine his articulation of the lyrics in time against the groove. It reminds me of the articulation genius of Little Walter, and you get it in both Walter’s harp and his singing. In Times Have Changed the groove oscillates between an eighth-note/sixteenth note anchor pattern and a triplet pattern—very much like the interlude in Just Like a Woman, a Dylan staple. You’re riding along on an eighth-note train and then a curve in the tracks, a triplet, pushes and pulls you. I have to listen to Dylan verse by verse with hard copy of the lyrics and a pencil. I have my own system for marking lyrical rhythms for rehearsal. I do change the rhythmic patterns as I find my way in, even the melody, but not before I internalize the original cadences as best I can.

The lyrics themselves are gorgeous and make performing the song a flow experience, not so casual. I used to care, but… things have changed, sings this guy. There’s something happening here but… you don’t know what it is, sings the guy in Thin Man. There is a woman—the guy’s in love with a woman who’s not even “appealing,” and he fantasizes about falling in love with the first woman he meets, carrying her in a wheelbarrow down the street. The guy starts out the evening with an assassin on his lap drinking champagne. If Dylan had kept the unappealing woman in the plot, but put a man in the wheelbarrow fantasy—bending gender sits just underneath the literal meaning of the words. Bettye Lavette produced a new version, even a deeper version leveraging Dylan’s contribution, where we get a worried black woman with a worried mind sitting in the lap of a white male assassin, tables turned, cables disconnected, Senor-style.