Changes
by David Bowie
- 112
- BPM
- C major
- Key
- 8B
- Camelot
- 55
- Danceability
- 51
- Acousticness
In early 1971, David Bowie came home to Haddon Hall in Beckenham after an American promotional tour and started writing. He had tried folk, hard rock and soul by then, and none of them had made him a star. Over three dozen songs came out of that house, including "Changes". He demoed it in June 1971.
He recorded it at Trident Studios in London on July 30, with Ken Scott co-producing. Rick Wakeman played piano, and the band behind him would later be known as the Spiders from Mars: Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and Mick Woodmansey. Bowie played a saxophone solo, his first on record, and said the track started out as a parody of a nightclub song, a kind of throwaway. He did not know the chord changes on guitar or piano, and followed his fingers up and down the keyboard to find them.
The lyrics were about artistic reinvention and about distancing himself from the rock mainstream, and the second verse told parents to let their children be themselves. RCA put it out as a single on January 7, 1972, and it flopped. It gained attention after Ziggy Stardust, and in 1975 it became the B-side of the "Space Oddity" reissue. That single gave Bowie his first UK number one.
Changes runs at 112 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.14 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 536 ms. It is in C major, Camelot 8B, which shares its notes with A minor and mixes cleanly with F major and G major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.