The genius of Love, that quite unorthodox late-1960's group, was not sufficiently appreciated by its contemporaries: Jim Morrison's favourite group, headed by his personal friend Arthur Lee, seems to have been sufficiently ahead of their time for their music to be ungraspable in the 1960's. Love's third album 'Forever Changes', was released in 1967 - that same year The Doors debuted with their eponymous album and Pink Floyd released 'Piper at the Gates of Dawn', their first album. The latter two bands enjoyed greater success in terms of sales and fame, but in terms of artistic quality and elegance they are certainly rivalled by Love.

'Forever Changes' is a melancholic album about life: 'Old Man' relates such distant subjects as youhful love and elderly people while 'Alone Again Or' may be about loneliness and waiting. Possibly, the theme is rather life in the 1960's: 'Live And Let Live' seems to be related to drugs and confusion and 'The Red Telephone' captures the uncertainty, fear and paranoia of the Cold War. At times, the uncertainty is nearly absurd: "I feel real phony when my name is Phil/Or was that Bill?" (compare to the first two lines of Camus' 'L’Étranger' in Gilbert's translation: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday").

The cover is quite outstanding: initially, I related the shape to Africa, reasoning that Lee's skin colour and the then ongoing decolonization of Africa - where hippies could have found collecivist ideas and harmony with nature in remote villages - would have encouraged such a cover. My curent interpretation is rather of the cover as a colorful portrayal of the band's members, like the album at large is a colorful portrayal of life itself.

Overall the album - as it is understood fourty years after its release - is one of the greatest albums within phsychedelia and reinvented folk music. While the themes may be sinister, the compositions approaches them in a gently way, producing in a quite comfortable album about things severely uncomfortable.