Change

Album: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You (2022)
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Songfacts®:

  • Here, Big Thief singer Adrianne Lenker dreamily ponders the meaning of everything in transition.

    Change like the wind
    Like the water, like skin
    Change like the sky
    Like the leaves, like a butterfly
  • Lenker wrote the song at Studio In The Clouds, a recording retreat facility located just outside the ski resort of Telluride, Colorado. She sweetly insists throughout the tune that change is inevitable and vital.

    "Most songs I write I don't understand them until later," she admitted to Uncut magazine. "It really doesn't feel like I'm writing them. I feel like I'm receiving them. It's like I'm becoming translucent, my body disappears. There's stuff from outside of me. And stuff within me and it mixes into this river and it just moves through."

    "When that happens," she added, "it's euphoric: woah, holy crap! It's just a crazy feeling. At first it feels like a heaviness, a pressure inside, a yearning that I need to sit with a guitar. 'Change' came out in one swoop."

    Within an hour of Lenker writing "Change" she and drummer/producer James Krivchenia were playing the track. Within the next hour they'd recorded it.
  • The song opens Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. As its title suggests, the album shifts away from Big Thief's early indie rock music toward something more akin to Donavan-esqe cosmic folk.
  • Big Thief took the album title from a line in "Anything," a track on Lenker's 2020 solo album Songs.

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