Forever Changes by Love

Forever Changes, Love's third album, came out on Elektra in November 1967, and Arthur Lee's Los Angeles band traded the garage for the drawing room. Acoustic guitars and orchestral arrangements carry these songs, soft and ornate on the surface, while underneath Lee, the band's chief songwriter, broods on mortality and sours on the counterculture that was supposed to be saving everyone. Bruce Botnick produced, and Bryan MacLean, Johnny Echols and Ken Forssi were all still aboard.

It was the last word from the original lineup. Once it was finished, MacLean walked out on bad terms and Lee let the rest of the band go. The record crawled to 154 in the US and did better in Britain at 24, but time has been kind: it's now counted among the finest albums of the 1960s, and it went into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007 and the National Recording Registry in 2011.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.