Everything has changed in recent years. Many of us have moved from where we were (particularly those of us in London), our outlook on life might have changed, friends have got married, others having children, others still making other drastic changes to their lives.

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It is a reminder that nothing stays still, and that our lives are in continual change – it just feels that post-COVID, change has accelerated a bit. Thus, /Tuesday Ten /569 is all about change. The big changes to the little ones.

Thanks, as ever, to everyone that got involved and offered suggestions for this.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Nine Inch Nails
/The Becoming
/The Downward Spiral

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One of the few NIN songs that I love that I never saw live over the years is The Becoming: a human-mechanical hybrid in every way. Perhaps influenced by legendary Japanese body horror Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Trent Reznor weaves a tale of human shedding their flesh and bone and becoming machine, and the feel of the song is such that the human within is still screaming to be heard. Musically, too, it reflects this: the industrial, electronic-based grind gives way to an unexpected acoustic interlude as the human fights back.

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/Men At Work
/Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive
/Cargo

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A band best known outside of their native Australia for the enduring 1981 megahit Down Under (a song that celebrated the Australian diaspora around the world, to an extent), they did have other hits – and some of them were particularly strange, such as Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive, from 1983: where Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous story is used as a basis for an allegory for the changing nature of humans, and how they can snap when life gets too much.

I could, of course, have used Jekyll and Hyde by Five Finger Death Punch, but, well…

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/Pink Suits
/Kimberly May
/Dystopian Hellscape

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I’ve featured the excellent (relatively!) local band Pink Suits a few times now, and frankly any excuse to mention their queer, feminist punk rock again. So here is one of the highlights of their recent album, where guitarist and vocalist Lennie considers their origins and life. As they’ve told us from onstage before, this song came about because they were told that if they’d been born a girl, they were going to be called “Kimberly May”, and this song see them musing on what they might be one day, if they chose to take up that path. Would they be happier, more content, if they chose to be?

What they choose to do, and how they choose to present themselves, of course, is their own fucking business, and doesn’t need others criticising their choice or lifestyle. You don’t offer opinions, you offer support (so often lacking from wider society or Government, of course).

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/Deftones
/Change (In The House of Flies)
/White Pony

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A surprising turn from Deftones was to release this slow-burning ballad as the lead track from third album White Pony, but in retrospect, it was a wise choice. White Pony was a very different album to Around The Fur – it required rather more work on the listener’s part than the directness of what had come before. Change, then – long a fan favourite at live shows – sees Chino Moreno observing the change in another, and deploring the choices that have taken them down that route, using an extended fly metaphor to describe the unpleasant changes that they see.

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/ABBA
/Take a Chance on Me
/ABBA: The Album

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One of ABBA’s greatest singles – and cleverest mixes – is all about trying to change someone’s mind. The multi-tracked, multi-person vocals overload the mix to begin with – with Agnetha and Anni-Frid doing one vocal line, and Björn and Benny the other – before the song starts proper, with Agnetha and Anni-Frid taking turns to convince someone that they really are serious about hooking up, and they should think again about their initial rejection. As is so often the way with the surprisingly bleak nature of so many ABBA songs, the issue remains unresolved as the song fades out.

This song was, of course, the origin of the massive resurgence in interest in ABBA in the early 1990s, too, when Erasure covered a number of songs for their Abbaesque EP and topped the charts, and this track was the lead single…

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/Mind.in.a.box
/Change
/Lost Alone

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The remarkable debut album from Mind.in.a.box turns twenty this year, and a remastered version with a handful of extra tracks comes next month, but for now let’s return to the original. The first part of a (so far!) seven album series that have continued the dystopian cyberpunk adventures of Black, as they try and find their own sense of self and identity in a technological world, and discover more than they ever bargained for, it remains a deeply affecting, elegant electronic release, quite unlike any of their peers as European industrial moved on from Futurepop – but critically, it doesn’t require full knowledge of the story to be moved by these extraordinary songs.

The gorgeous intro track Light & Dark has backmasked vocals and seemingly reveals nothing, so Change is where we first meet Black, and the song is extraordinary. The gentle vocal treatment of the verses – where the as-yet unnamed protagonist laments their lonely but superficially contented life – gives way to a soaring, vocoder-assisted chorus that has a mighty emotional wallop as it comes out of nowhere. By the close of the song, they are sure that they control their own destiny, and that they will never change their outlook. There are surprises in store for Black…

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/One Minute Silence
/If I Can Change
/Buy Now…Saved Later

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One Minute Silence – beyond their ferocious live reputation – were a band all about political and social change and evolution, advocating anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist views from the start. Their second album, which saw a step-up in songwriting and production, was at points slower-paced and more thoughtful, but the mosh-friendly moments their audience demanded were still there – you just had to wait a bit for the payoff on occasions. If I Can Change was one such song, where vocalist Yap lives in terror of finding himself becoming the people he criticises, but fights every such possibility so that he can continue to change for the better instead.

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/LCD Soundsystem
/I Can Change
/This Is Happening

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James Murphy’s songs have always taken an askance view at the idea of change. Deeply indebted to his musical past – and indeed writing entire songs about his debt to them and how tastes change – he helped blur the lines between indie rock and dance music in the early 2000s in ways that are still rippling across dancefloors to this day, but his thoughtful songs have often addressed the concept of personal change, too. The mighty All My Friends sees him addressing the importance of friendship and the support of those friends to change for the better, but by the time of third album This Is Happening, it was clear Murphy’s life had hit some turbulence.

I Can Change is at the heart of that, as he addresses bumpy roads in a relationship: there are fights, disagreements, pleas for his lover to never change (presumably to keep the one he loved at the beginning), before pleading later on in the song that he change, he can make things better. That’s the thing about relationships: we change, and not always in the same way, and both parties must adapt to those changes to keep things together, and sometimes it’s hard. James Murphy’s songs in LCD Soundsystem remain some of the few to be so frank about the trials and tribulations of getting older together, and is one of the many reasons why I still love his songs so.

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/Sick of It All
/District
/Yours Truly

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Finally, two songs on societal change, but at different levels. Sick of it All want change in their home area, on a muscular, thundering metallic hardcore base. In their local society, it isn’t just crime in the streets – robbery, violence and such, but also poor choices and corruption by their local officials, looking for a better deal for themselves rather than the best for their constituents. Thus, Sick of it All want change for the better, with better politicians and better choices made, so that things can improve for everyone. Sadly, over thirty years on, I suspect little has changed.

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/Sam Cooke
/A Change Is Gonna Come
/Ain’t That Good News

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Sam Cooke’s sadly short time as an extraordinary soul singer was cut short by his death just weeks before the release of his defining song. A song that was inspired by Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind – where Cooke realised he should put his own frustrations with his place as a black man in America down in song – and by, of course, his own experiences with racism as he toured and travelled. But he could see change on the horizon, and this strident song would be adopted by others in the Civil Rights movement as change finally did begin to come (even if it never, even to this day, ever went quite far enough).