Chris Swanson’s Song of the Month:
Dion “Didn’t You Change”
Monday, December 7, 2009
We leave a canyon behind us each summer. Each year its yawn grows more massive, and the echo from the shout that we wail from its rim resounds deeper and longer. Dion knew this. By 1972, the former pop sensation had long since outgrown the narrow parameters that the pop charts afforded teen idols (heroin addiction didn’t fit Tiger Beat, I suppose) and was a half-decade into making singer-songwriter albums well below the mainstream’s radar. It was this year that he released the album Suite for Late Summer which contains the sublime “Didn’t You Change“, one of my favorite odes to coming of age (ranking with Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” and John Duigan’s cinematic masterwork The Year My Voice Broke). The reflective vibe of the song is established with an acoustic guitar introduction, soon followed by stately piano and wistful harmonica. Then his voice comes in and you realize what made Dion a star in the first place.
Wasn’t it fun / chasing the sun / for a blur of wings streaking the air.
It’s a wiser voice now, with more to say and plenty of patience for the telling. He knows when to sing with the pedal steel and when to let it sing for him. It’s a chorus-less song, but never do you feel it lacking for emotional moments.
Didn’t you change / oh didn’t you rearrange / my life with a wave of your hand / happy to be oh just running with me / leaving footprints behind in the sand.
That Dion didn’t repeat that verse later as a chorus is the most magically restrained aspect of this song, and perhaps of his entire career. A decade earlier he certainly would have repeated it. And it would have been the right thing to do. It would have been a massive hit. Perhaps this restraint is less a sign of growing wiser, and more a signal of Dion losing his edge? Hard to tell. And beside the point. In ”Didn’t You Change”, Dion achieved his fullest expression as an artist. And that is a beautiful thing.
Why couldn’t we reach from silence to speech / like a river that longs for the sea / stopping to share an occasional prayer / in the shade of a leaf-heavy tree.
The tale goes that we all have a season where the game changes for us, that developmental fulcrum by which all transitions are measured. And for some reason it’s easier to spot that season when — for many days in a row — the sun is high in the sky, our shirts are off and a body of water sits close by. And we — enjoying that truly epic season; the one for the books. Dion had his. You can hear it.
Ed. Note: Chris Swanson comes to us from Dead Oceans/Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian HQ in lovely Bloomington, Indiana–where summer never ends, but is only paused for a few months each year. Here’s his entry on Van Morrison, and Caroline Crawford.