47. Tame Impala - “Yes I’m Changing”
After an album like Currents, Tame Impala was bound to make it on this list later rather than sooner. It was truly a wonderful album, from a band that somehow manages to age as gracefully as possible, maintaining their aesthetic while constantly tweaking and evolving their sound into something better and more complete.
This song is soupy grooviness at its finest. Its a song that somehow manages to lock into the human psyche and record the echoes and reverberations of thoughts as they swim through the tangled mess of logic and contemplation. Its that otherworldly feeling that encompasses you as you find yourself in the crux of a difficult conversation, when you start thinking about your thoughts as they’re leaking out, running your fingers through them, questioning them as you try to find the proper words to express the feelings churning within.
It’s an impossible task, because thought was never meant to be confined to language, stream of consciousness is just that, a stream, with thousands - even millions of molecules of thought being simplified into a continuous babbling stream of slippery and incoherent liquid language. Something is lost in the process, the majesty, the order of it all, turns capricious and disorganized, and you see it, but you cant stop it, you can’t give in, so you forge on. All of your thoughts have led you here, all of the conversations with yourself have paved the way toward the real thing. You can’t turn back, not when it’s so close.
You can sense the change, the end, the hopelessness of trying to keep it all bottled within, of hoping things will fall back into place. You’re beyond it, floating passed its gravity well. There’s no going back. You have to break it off. You have to drift away. You only hope she’ll let you. That she’ll understand, somehow hopping into your thoughts and soaking it up, seeing past the words and into the core, to the beauty of what you had and the pain of seeing it gone. That each person is unique, and that the love created is unique as well, that both evolve, and sometimes they evolve out of sync, incompatible and harmful toward one another. That it’s nobody’s fault. Its the nature of life, of the universe. That love is meant to propel, not confine. That change is good, but not easy, and that your resoluteness isn’t ill-willed, but arises from kindness, practical despite its pain. That you’re powerless, your only option is to let go, and you hope she’ll let you, that the hands can slip apart peacefully without any tearing or clawing and drift away.
