Things Have Changed

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As of December 8, 2019, the date of its most recent outing, Dylan has performed the song 1,060 times. The song was inspired by a meeting with country musician Marty Stuart and Stuart's song "The Observations of a Crow" from the concept album The Pilgrim. As he explained to Uncut, "We did 'Things Have Changed' in one afternoon, and when we were done we did a very quick mix of it, and I thought it was just going to be a rough mix to give to Bob who’d maybe give it to someone else, like Daniel Lanois, who’d wind up engineering and mixing the final thing. Vozick-Levinson, Jon Dolan,Patrick Doyle,Andy Greene,Brian Hiatt,Angie Martoccio,Rob Sheffield,Hank Shteamer,Simon; Dolan, Jon; Doyle, Patrick; Greene, Andy; Hiatt, Brian; Martoccio, Angie; Sheffield, Rob; Shteamer, Hank; Vozick-Levinson, Simon (2020-06-18). These themes align with Dylan’s recurrent motifs and offer a poignant reflection on personal experiences, seamlessly integrating into the context of Wonder Boys.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. In the end, therefore, ‘Things Have Changed’ stands as a testament to Dylan’s remarkable knack for swiftly creating art — a skill possessed by only a chosen few.I knew it was in the movie "Wonder Boys," which I watched last night (The movie is OK - the song is the best part). Many modern musicians still regard it as one of his best tracks, including Eagles’ very own Don Henley. Engineer Chris Shaw has confirmed there was another version, which "was really great, which had a kind of New Orleans shuffle to it". Henley added: “I was driving around one day, and I’d never heard it before, and I thought to myself, ‘Wow, somebody is really doin’ a good Bob Dylan. Things Have Changed" is a Dylan song in the style of "Time Out of Mind" and is excellent, as expected.

As the song progresses it's as if the narrator is becoming too tired to finish a phrase, leaving a pregnant pause before dropping the final words—but, then again, Dylan may also be adopting a trick performed by Sinatra when stretching lines and hesitating before singing the final word or phrase". Brian Hiatt, writing in Rolling Stone, where the song placed first on a 2020 list of "The 25 Best Bob Dylan Songs of the 21st Century", saw it as a stylistic about-face from 1997's Daniel Lanois-produced Time Out of Mind and the beginning of an important new chapter in Dylan's career: "The effortless feel of the playful-yet-ominous, hard-grooving, utterly dazzling 'Things Have Changed' was an early indication of the renewed friskiness of Dylan’s 21st-century work — and the vividly live-in-the studio creations he would achieve as his own producer, with the help of engineer Chris Shaw".Shaw hoped to include this unreleased version on Volume 8 of Dylan's Bootleg Series, Tell Tale Signs.

This makes it his ninth most frequently performed live song ever and the only Dylan song since the 1970s on the list of his top 10 most performed songs. Dylan critic Kees de Graaf places "Things Have Changed" in the context of the Biblical teaching Dylan encountered when he studied with the Vineyard Fellowship in the late 1970s. But when the studio recording could not be located, it was replaced by a live version recorded in Portland, Oregon, on June 15, 2000. In truth, ‘Things Have Changed’ is often considered one of Dylan’s later-period gems, and rightly so. Sources agree the musicians who accompanied Dylan in the studio were his touring band at the time: Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell on guitar, Tony Garnier on bass and David Kemper on drums and percussion.On February 2, 2014, an arrangement of "Things Have Changed" was used in a commercial for the Chrysler 200, aired during Super Bowl XLVIII. Among the very first was country singer Waylon Jennings who made it a staple of his final live shows in 2000 and 2001.