A Change of Heart

Album: I Like It When You Sleep... (2015)
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Songfacts®:

  • This electro-pop ballad depicts the stages of falling out of love with someone. Matt Healy details his fading infatuation with the girl he's been seeing as he begins to take notice of her imperfections and flaws.
  • Healy described the tune to BBC Radio 1's Annie Mac as, "such a simple song - three notes - and the truth. We wanted it to [have] serious conviction. It turned into a very atypical '1975' song, being very sentimental, very self-aware, and as beautiful as we can make it."
  • The song incorporates concepts and lyrics from several other The 1975 tracks, including the opening line of "Sex," ("This is how it starts"), "Robbers," ("You used to have a face straight out of a magazine") and "The City."

    The lyric "I feel as though I was deceived. I never found love in the city" is Healy's admittance that what he sang on "The City" hasn't come true now he's older and wiser. He explained to Rolling Stone: "There's a knowing to this album in place of the naiveté of the first one. I think that's what I reference a lot. 'I never found love in the city.' 'You used to have a face straight out of a magazine.' There's a resignation to that hopeful naiveté in this record that replaces that. It's all about being the same guy. It's a world now. It's a community. It's a whole thing, the 1975. At least to us because we're in the middle of it."
  • The black-and-white video was directed by Tim Mattia (Sam Hunt, Troye Sivan) and written by Matt Healy. It follows the antics of a sad sack circus clown played by The 1975 frontman. The clown ruins his chances of getting the girl he loves when their carnival date doesn't work out and he is left sitting under a literal rain cloud.

    The clip nods to Federico Fellini's The Clowns (1970), Michael Jackson's moonwalk, Charlie Chaplin, The Wiz, Gene Kelly and Bob Fosse. "I want to convey the sense of resignation in being a clown," said Healy. "I am, have been and will always be a clown. I think it can tire people."
  • The song got Healy into trouble. He recalled to NME: "I got a phone call off my ex just going f--king nuts. I had to be like, 'It's not really even about you, sorry.'"

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