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This is an album from the psychedelic age. The original album cover art was processed with Craquelure in order to brighten up the colours and obtain an embossed effect. It looks more contemporary than
the flat flourescents that I saw in psychedelic posters back in the late 60s and the colours stand out well against the white background. The tilting of the heads is meant to depict the altered state of the
mind characteristic of the psychedelic experience.
This is the unaltered state of the original album cover art design.
No. 11, The Virgin All-Time Album Top 1000; No. 40, Rolling Stone, The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time;
No. 49, Rate Your Music, The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time; No. 65, Entertainment Weekly, 100 Greatest Albums Ever.
Cover design by William S. Harvey, art by Bob Pepper. Album produced by Bruce Botnick and Arthur Lee. Elektra, Rhino 1967.
Love's Forever Changes made only a minor dent on the charts when it was first released in 1967, but years later it became recognized as one of the finest and most haunting albums to come out of the
Summer of Love, which doubtless has as much to do with the disc's themes and tone as the music, beautiful as it is. Sharp electric guitars make occasional appearances here; most of the songs are built
around interwoven acoustic guitar textures and subtle orchestrations, with strings and horns both reinforcing and punctuating the melodies.
The punky edge of Love's early work gave way to a more gentle, contemplative, and organic sound on Forever Changes, but while Arthur Lee and Bryan MacLean wrote some of their most enduring songs
for the album, the lovely melodies and inspired arrangements can't disguise an air of malaise that permeates the sessions. A certain amount of this reflects the angst of a group undergoing some severe
internal strife, but Forever Changes is also an album that heralds the last days of a golden age and anticipates the growing ugliness that would dominate the counterculture in 1968 and 1969.
Forever Changes is inarguably Love's masterpiece and an album of enduring beauty, but it's also one of the few major works of its era that saw the dark clouds looming on the cultural horizon, and the
result was music that was as prescient as it was compelling. Full article
(A) Alone Again Or - A House is Not a Motel - Andmoreagain - The Daily Planet - Old Man - The Red Telephone
(B) Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale - Live and Let Live - The Good Humour Man He Sees Everything Like This - Bummer in the Summer - You Set the Scene
