Hyperfocus #3: Twenty years of Keane's "Everybody's Changing", my musical North Star

I can trace a lot of the things I do now—including the existence of this very writing project—to the British band's breakout single.

This Friday marks twenty years since Keane released “Everybody’s Changing”.

The first version, at least. The version that appears on their debut full-length, Hopes and Fears—the version we are all familiar with—is a slightly different one. This early version was a home recording, made just after the departure of the band’s first guitarist.¹ At a time where piano-driven rock was becoming in vogue in the UK—led by, of course, Coldplay—”Everybody’s Changing” proved to be their breakthrough, being championed by the BBC’s Steve Lamacq and later leading them to sign with Island Records.

Twenty years on, the band is still a stalwart of that awkward overlap between early-noughties alternative and today’s mom-friendly mainstream pop. While it’s their early stuff that remains familiar to most people, their albums have always been on, or close to, the top spot in the British album charts. I still hear this song on the radio—but then again, lately I’ve been listening to European radio, and this is a reliable hit for them.

Twenty years on, the impact of this song to me personally—and beyond the feelings we tend to attach to our favorite songs—is still felt. I do not exaggerate when I call “Everybody’s Changing” my musical North Star. My love of music, my writing about music, the people I know and the people I knew—I can trace them back to that Tuesday afternoon coming home from school when I heard this song for the first time.

I’m surprised that I still remember that moment so vividly. I mean, I tend to forget a lot of things, especially these days. But I remember most of it. I was a high school senior when Manila radio began playing the song—the rerecorded, 2004 version, of course. My mom always picked me up from school and drove me home. The sun was setting. I remember how orange the sky was as I slouched in the passenger seat, feeling stickier than I should.

It must be the piano. It must be the fact that it’s just the piano. Keane started with a guitarist, and they eventually got Jesse Quin on board to play guitars from their 2008 album Perfect Symmetry. But in the period in between, they relied heavily on keyboards and the piano as the lead instrument, which led to some interesting results.

I didn’t know much then. I grew up with my parents listening to what we loosely call “smooth jazz” radio stations here in Manila—loosely, because a lot of what they played were 70s and 80s pop. It’s not that I didn’t listen to modern pop music, too, but I’ll say I didn’t have much of an appreciation of the subtle differences between genres as a 15-year-old. I liked bands, but they almost always had a guitar. It sounds stupid now, but Keane pretty much opened my head to a different sound—and it was something that bridged my musical upbringing and what I wanted to listen to at the time.

It was 2004, so listening to your favorite songs on demand wasn’t a thing yet, although we were in the tail-end of the era. Request shows were still a thing on the radio, although as I lived just outside of Manila—which meant phone calls were more expensive—I never asked for “Everybody’s Changing” on the radio. I didn’t text either; I so badly wanted to save what little prepaid credit I had for the month. I wished for it on the radio, and listened closely when it did come on. Same thing when it came on MTV.

My love of this song informed my first forays into buying my own albums. To be fair, there were many factors. 2004 was smack in the middle of the renaissance of the Filipino alternative scene, and I was borrowing albums from my classmates to listen to for a weekend². I was also dipping into my being a radio geek, and yes, I latched on to British radio first, even if I couldn’t really listen to them for long stretches of time because we only had dial-up Internet.

I eventually saved enough of my allowance to get myself a copy of Hopes and Fears. I don't remember if I got it on a school day—which meant I was at that old Odyssey branch in Alabang Town Center sticky from sweat—or on a weekend. I don’t think I listened to that album repeatedly, not like how my sister, a Linkin Park fan³, would always have Meteora on, or how my mother would always play either John Mayer’s Room for Squares (another favorite musician of mine) or Evanescence’s Fallen in the car. But I listened to it enough to anticipate, say, the propulsive start to “Bend and Break”, or the more subtle details of “Sunshine” and “Untitled 1”⁴.

But I always went back to “Everybody’s Changing”. It was, by all means, a more collected track: it didn’t quite reach the dramatic levels of “Somewhere Only We Know” or “This Is The Last Time”. It was confident staying in the middle lane, which meant the elements—Tom Chaplin’s serene-yet-pained vocal, Tim Rice-Oxley’s chiming piano, and Richard Hughes’ driving percussion—managed to shine more. And, of course, there’s the sentiment of the song itself.

So little time
Try to understand that I'm
Trying to make a move just to stay in the game
I try to stay awake and remember my name
But everybody's changing
And I don't feel the same

I suppose I didn’t attach meanings to songs the way I have for the past decade or so, and especially in the past few months that I’ve been working on the Once Monthly. But listening back to the song now, as I write this, I recall how I always felt left behind by my peers, how I had to keep up but couldn’t, how I felt uncomfortable even when I should be. I can say that I spent most of my life trying to find my own crowd, and just when I thought I have, I turn out to just be an outsider, an interloper. Or, I suppose I say all that in the frame of the unworthiness foisted upon me almost a year ago. Nonetheless, I always felt that same pang of desperation from the final instrumental to the final chorus, especially in the music video, when it’s Tom’s turn to “change”.

Despite that, the song did help me forge an identity of my own. It was pretty important in university, where, for better or worse, appearances really did matter. At least I could say that I had a favorite band and mean it, that I had a favorite song and mean it. And I don’t think others had that as their choice. Shallow, I know. That said, owning that fact elsewhere meant being mocked for having pedestrian tastes—but then, I made the mistake of professing my favorites on the now-defunct BBC 6 Music message boards. They have better tastes there and will not miss the opportunity to thumb down your likes to your virtual face.

I’ve always liked music, but I wouldn’t turn it into a personality trait of sorts until I found myself deep into exploring the genres that I was interested in—a journey that began when “Everybody’s Changing” came on the radio and put all my preferences in focus. I’d end up starting a music blog and writing it for seven years, expanding my tastes in pursuit of content.⁵ I’d be meeting people, making friends, some of them very good ones. I’d even attempt to interview musicians, a skill that oddly comes in handy in my day job, of all things. Maybe attributing all that to the song is a stretch, but whenever I think about it, it all goes back to that moment in my mom’s car in 2004.

It all really only clicked into place, though, a few months ago. I’ve written about it before—the time when I found myself in a hotel restaurant, accompanying my friend Nat as she tried to say hello to the guys of Phoenix. We actually first met in the aftermath of Keane’s only concert here in Manila. Well, she was in the front row (and got meet-and-greet passes to boot) and I was at the seventh (and was only willing to take a half-day off at work and nothing more), so we never really met during the concert. It took a year.

Anyway, while waiting, we talked about how we got to where we are. She mentioned getting into the Strokes and how that led her to being a globe-trotting concert watcher, getting her face on the NME in the process. I mentioned how I was listening to Hopes and Fears again. Somewhere along the way I mentioned that we turned out to be discussing our musical North Stars. Bingo, I suppose. Keane’s “Everybody’s Changing” is my musical North Star. Amidst all the feelings of being lost, of constantly looking for a place I belong in and a person I truly belong to, I always come back to it—not just because it’s familiar, not just because it reminds me of a simpler time, but because, to me at least, it’s a buoy in a stormy sea. It holds its own. It’s timeless. And, especially now, it’s always there, telling me that I’m not alone in all this.

1. I heard this version on at least two radio stations in Manila. I remember being annoyed because it feels emptier, at least at the start—understandably, because it’s a home recording.

2. Actually, mostly one classmate. A shoutout to Gio, my high school classmate, who was so patient with my requests and lent me what I think is most of his local albums at the time. He was into bands, and played an instrument himself, so it was through him that I got to listen to, say, Sponge Cola’s self-titled EP before their breakthrough success. That said, the first album I ever got was from a solo artist: Kitchie Nadal. It was a Christmas gift from my parents.

3. I wrote about my sister’s love of Linkin Park back on the old music blog, in response to the news of vocalist Chester Bennington’s death.

4. I live in the Philippines, so I got the “international edition” of Hopes and Fears, which rearranged some songs and dropped “On A Day Like Today” completely. Only in the past few months did I listen to the album as the British knew it. This reminds me of how I refused to but Keane’s follow-up, 2006’s Under the Iron Sea, because they only sold the “Philippine version”—a cheaper CD, without the album booklet, ostensibly to combat piracy. It took me several years and a stroke of luck (possibly abroad) to find a regular version with the starkly beautiful art from British-Finnish artist Sanna Annukka.

5. I remember trying to impress a girl by talking to her about Kimbra. Turns out she knew about her. She then introduced me to K-pop.