“Changes” has one of the longer backstories you’ll find behind a single. Dante Shivers started writing it in London after meeting a ballerina through a mutual friend, an evening that turned into a late-night conversation about life, travel, and how hard it actually is to chase the future you picture for yourself. He finished the lyrics back in New York, then shelved the song entirely for nearly fifteen years. He finally completed the recording in Thailand, partway through a personal journey to rediscover who he wants to be, closing the loop on a song a much younger version of him had written about wondering whether he’d ever get there.
That long gestation shows how patient the song is. It takes its time telling its story, and it’s paced expertly, largely thanks to drum work that never overplays its hand, with fills sprinkled through the arrangement in a way that keeps the track feeling far shorter than it actually is. The harmony stays genuinely locked in with what the lyrics are doing thematically rather than just riding along underneath them, and the guitar solo threaded through the track is tasteful in a way longer songs don’t always manage, restrained enough that it never tips into indulgence for its own sake.
Given the timeline behind it, “Changes” ending up as a song about the passage of time and holding onto yourself while everything else shifts feels almost inevitable, not convenient. Few artists get to finish a song fifteen years after starting it while actually living out the exact question it was written around, and that history gives the finished track a weight that a song written and recorded in the same month simply couldn’t carry.
