Change
by Charlie Puth (featuring James Taylor)

Album: Voicenotes (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • This folksy track features James Taylor. Puth recalled to Billboard how he had to calm the "Fire and Rain" singer before he recorded his contribution. "He was texting me, like, 'This is a really high song. How am I going to be able to sing this?'" recalled Puth. "I was like, 'Number 1, you're James Taylor. Number 2, I have it in my head exactly how you're going to sing it; I can just hear it.' Lo and behold, that's how it happened. We didn't even have to change keys."
  • The socially progressive track finds Puth and Taylor questioning why we're a society that cannot love one another openly.

    Why can't we just get along?
    If loving one another's wrong
    Then how are we supposed to
    Get close to each other?
    We gotta make that change, yeah
    Why can't we just get along?


    Puth dedicated the song to the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, following the mass shooting there on February 14, 2018, which left 17 dead and many injured.
  • The song's official video was filmed on March 24, 2018 when Puth debuted "Change" at the Los Angeles leg of the March For Our Lives gun control demonstration.
  • Puth told Entertainment Weekly that though he wrote the song prior to the Parkland high school shooting, "I would watch the news and these brave kids from Parkland and these mindless politicians hiding behind their words... I called my manager and said, 'We have to get this song out. The world is calling for it.'"

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