Forever Changes

AOTY Recommended Albums #9 (1967)

After almost a decade, the jazz years of this series are over, replaced by psychedelia as I reach the late 1960s. Although there were a handful of popular bands trending towards a psychedelic sound pre-1967, this year was really the seismic shift in popular music. The popularity of jazz and rock and roll that dominated much of the last 30 years had given way, and popular music would never look back.

This album was pretty solid. A lot of the psychedelic stuff released around this time was pretty simple in its songwriting, and this is no different, aside from a couple moments here and there. The most unique part of this album is definitely the instrumentation. There are a lot of strings and horn passages here that were definitely out of the ordinary for the time. Altogether, the instrumentation is reminiscent of a lot more eastern influences that would come to definite psychedelic and progressive rock.