TIME FOR A CHANGE 1 APRIL 2019
Everything blends together eventually. You can call it entropy, erosion, degredation, there's a millions words through out time trying to explain decay. Maybe that's where we went wrong. Do we need to explain it? Can we just accept it? My fallback position when I get intellectualy lazy is "this is beyond human language." That's an obvious cop out.
I bring this up because I have two distinct memories of where this song was written - WAIT - they are one in the same! My timeline is off. Phew! I'm only still as crazy as when I woke up this morning.
The year was 1988. I had taken a year off from school to ingest large amounts of psychedelic drugs and then returned. I went to and lived at the University Of Maryland College Park, Cumberland Hall - a co-ed building. The previous year, 1987, was a great year for rock and roll. I spent the summer living and working (ish) in Ocean City, MD. That's also the last time I was arrested. Music-wise, for the under(ish) ground, the Mats had released PLEASE TO MEET ME. For mainstream bros and hos GnR's APPETITE FOR DESTRCUCTION was making everyone want to try heroin. For the collegiate types U2 had THE JOSHUA TREE and REM had DOCUMENT. The good music bled into '88 and provided a youthful guitar heavy soundtrack to my life. Public Enemy and NWA were about to pop.
I played in a band in Bawmer - Kona, the next in a long line of people who refused to play my fucking songs. So I would go to school during the week and come home on the weekends to play fucking cover songs to drunks. It was a way to keep my chops sharp. I can't stress this enough. It was a constant struggle to get anyone to play my songs. They referred to them as "originals" like they were some odd alien lifeform beyond the mere talents of idiot Marylanders. My reasoning was always "somebody had to write these fucking songs we're covering - they didn't just appear!" But the poeple around me who played gyuitars were always "yeah but they're songwriters. We're just people from Baltimore." Baltimore I love you but sometimes you really suck. So not having the resources to actually play all these fucking songs I was writing I categorized them in my own little library code - the Davey Decimal System.
That's a lot of backstory. I wrote "Time For a Change" when my best friend Made Hood was moving to Bali to study ethnomusicology. I was also moving on from my freshman year at college. It was a reset moment. Made was NOT someone who discouraged my songwriting. We actually wrote together. Two of our compositions eventually made it - part of them anyway - to THE BIG OPERA. He wrote the "slide on by" chorus in "The Orphan" and we came up with the riff to "How Do You Like That" after smoking around an ounce of weed.
This song, obviously, works well as an opener. So whenever I needed a first song in an opera I used this'n. It's not plot specific so you can use it anywhere - any setting, any time period. The only detail is "kazoo." It just so happenned that this song found a home in 1993. It was roughly written around this time, me being a young man who didn't know anything yet but was confident enough to try to make poeple learm his songs.
Musically this was recorded at The Shed in rural Bawmer County with Paul Kelley and Wil Berry, aka "Porky." Pork was the first guy EVER who was into playing my songs as the reason for a band. I'm forever grateful. Dig - by this time I was in my mid twenties. In my mind I had lost around a decade trying to convince people that we were worthy to write. It got easier for people coming up after me. There was no stigma to creativity for them. So I wrote this during Kona and a little interim band called Pritty Hary played it and then it sat in the 1993 folder for 20 years. This arrangement is pretty much the same as when it was written and demoed on my little TASCAM 4 track.