#26, “Suddenly Everything Has Changed,” The Flaming Lips (1999)

150 Favorite Songs: #26, “Suddenly Everything Has Changed,” The Flaming Lips (1999)

Here’s the thing about grief: It doesn’t track linearly. It doesn’t have a direct antecedent, an obvious narrative way of floating to the surface. It doesn’t come on for a clear reason, so its triggers are impossible to avoid. Grief doesn’t make sense.

I’ve known that was true for a long time, regardless of what kind of grief I’ve experienced. The moments that hit the hardest, that really knock you on your ass, are the ones that come out of nowhere, that if you were to try to untangle you’d find yourself hopelessly lost. You take out the trash and suddenly you’re devastated thinking about holding your dog as he gets an injection that’ll end his suffering. You flip through the channels and Zombieland is on and suddenly you’re filled with an ache for your dad that you know will just have to pass, because he’s not around to fill it anymore. You see a picture of an ostrich online and you don’t know why you’re thinking about an ex who left you a year ago, but it feels just as present as it did the day they split. Whatever it is you’ve grieved in your life, you’ve felt it this way, too. I don’t make a lot of assumptions about how other people’s systems work compared to mine, because I know that mine is not necessarily typical, but I’m confident in this one. You’ve felt this way, too.

“Suddenly Everything Has Changed” was the first thing I ever encountered that validated that feeling, the way that grief rises and falls and strikes you like a bolt from the sky. It was released just after I turned nineteen, and I didn’t even have much to grieve at that point in my life, but the truth of it was so wildly self-evident that I couldn’t believe that it took so long to find something that acknowledged it.

The song, like every song on The Soft Bulletin, is incredibly lush, just a lovely thing to listen to, harmonious and layered, the sonic equivalent of settling into bed. If it weren’t so beautiful, I don’t think it would hit in the same way, but it is, and it does.

putting all the vegetables away / that you bought at the grocery store today / and it goes fast / you think of the past / suddenly, everything has changed

The song is just three verses, with orchestral instrumental breaks where the chorus should be. All of them follow that same template, describing some mundane task, and then it goes fast and you think of the past, a pregnant beat that carries so much weight, and then Wayne Coyne, whose voice is often too unusual to be effectively emotive, delivering the plaintive lament as an acknowledgment of whatever loss it is that hits in that moment. suddenly everything has changed.

“Suddenly Everything Has Changed” doesn’t attempt to articulate what’s been lost, or even how it feels. It doesn’t even necessarily address loss specifically, except that the passage of time inherently comes with a sense of it—we can feel grief for the fact that we’re no longer as young as we once were, or that the young people we knew as children are no longer small, or that the joy we felt on a particularly good day is now further from us than it’s ever been before. It uses “change” and “loss” as synonyms, which they are, even though “change” carries with it the possibility that that whatever was lost might have been replaced by something better.

But my experience of grief is that it feels just like the way it does in this song. It feels like putting all the clothes you washed away, and hesitating when you put away the sheets, and then feeling it in your stomach as the sensation rises in your stomach. suddenly everything has changed. Because you can forget. You have to, a lot of the time, otherwise you’re not able to function, and the vegetables need to be put away, and so do the sheets, and you have to drive home, and in order for those things to be possible, you need to have distance from whatever it is you’re grieving. Even if it’s small. And then when it returns to the fore, everything else stops for a moment. suddenly everything has changed.

There’s a line in Sandman that I think about a lot. It’s late in the series, when Dream and Delirium are on a road trip looking for their missing brother. They’ve recruited a driver to take them around the country, and Delirium asks her questions that seem increasingly inane. there must be a word for it, she says. the thing that lets you know time is happening. is there a word? And the driver, who’s graciously listened to these questions, says, kindly, “beats me, hon.” Then, in the next panel, Dream tells her. “Change.”

I don’t fear change, but as you get older, and accumulate more life, change comes to mean something deeper than it used to. The changes you see get bigger, or maybe just feel the way, because they carry the implication that you’ve moved so far from the world you were born into, and there is so much loss that is inevitable as that happens. I don’t dwell on these sort of thoughts much, but when one of them does hit, it usually feels just like it does in this song.