‘Something Changed’: the perfection of Pulp’s simple love song
Everyone tells you that when it’s right, love is simple. That’s the tip that people bring up again and again, the statement that all great romances settle into: just a feeling of peace, ease, normality, contentment. Sure, the entire romance genre relies on a degree of drama, but the lives of humans aren’t movies, and Jarvis Cocker has always been a poet for the everyman. So, for Pulp’s finest love song, the chaos is cut, and love comes down to a simple statement: “Something changed”.
My parents met in a club in the 1980s. My mum was on a night out with her friends, so was my dad, but back then, they were just two people in their 20s with no idea what was coming. They were two strangers, but then they met, and now they’ve been together 30 years and have two daughters. My friends have similar stories of parents who met at parties, at work, even at school. I’m even getting to the age where friends have similar stories of their own with partners, meeting at uni and now wearing engagement rings or making plans to go off to the wedding of two other friends who met all because of a lucky swipe on an app, were open the same night and decided to take a chance on sacrificing a free evening on a stranger.
I think about my friends too. I met my best friends all down to luck, really. I was placed, by chance, in the same classes as them at university. I got talking to them by chance at gigs, both our separate lives colliding randomly one night, or I just happened to work at a company that also hired them. These are moments we have no control over, but they change everything. Suddenly, this other person is around, and we can’t imagine life without them; had one thing happened differently, we’re aware that’s how it would be.
That’s the premise of Pulp’s ‘Something Changed’. It’s also the premise of so many other love songs, like ‘I’m a Believer’, Micky Dolenz joyously singing, “Then I saw her face / Now I’m a believer”, or Roberta Flack turning it into a grand ballad, crooning, “The first time, ever I saw your face / I thought the sun rose in your eyes”. But in his own signature style, Cocker’s take is simple and plain speaking, and that’s what makes it so perfect.
This is a love song for the love story that happens casually, every day. “I could have stayed at home and gone to bed / I could have gone to see a film instead / You might have changed your mind and seen your friends”, he sings in the first verse, laying out in plain language all the multitude of things that might have pushed two people onto a different timeline, concluding, “Life could have been very different but then / Something changed”.
It’s incredible, the weight a simple phrase can hold. “Something changed” means nothing really, but in this context, thinking about the impact a chance encounter can have, it means everything. It means so much that it briefly has Cocker, a man dedicated to rooting his art in reality, contemplating God as he sings, “Do you believe that there’s someone up above? / And does he have a timetable directing acts of love?”
But in the end, the song comes back to the staggering capabilities of total normality to be grand and romantic. It comes down to a simple action, a first meeting and the power it has, as he sings, “When we woke up that morning we had no way of knowing / That in a matter of hours we’d change the way we were going”.
And that’s the thing that everyone tells you. When it’s right, love is simple, and at any moment, at any chance encounter, you could fall right into it.
