"The Times They Are a-Changin'" is a song written by Bob Dylan and released as the title track of his 1964 album of the same name.
Dylan wrote the song as a deliberate attempt to create an anthem of change for the time, influenced by Irish and Scottish ballads.
[4] The song has been covered by many different artists, including Nina Simone; Josephine Baker; the Byrds; the Seekers; Peter, Paul and Mary; Tracy Chapman; Simon & Garfunkel; Blackmore's Night; Runrig; the Beach Boys; Joan Baez; Phil Collins; Billy Joel; Bruce Springsteen; Me First and the Gimme Gimmes; Brandi Carlile; and Burl Ives.
He recorded it as a Witmark publishing demo at that time, a version that was later released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991.
Dylan recalled writing the song as a deliberate attempt to create an anthem of change for the moment.
"[7] Gray suggested that the song has been made obsolete by the very changes that it predicted and hence was politically out of date almost as soon as it was written.
Literary critic Christopher Ricks suggested that "the song transcends the political preoccupations of the time in which it was written".
Ricks concluded, "Once upon a time it may have been a matter of urging square people to accept the fact that their children were, you know, hippies.
[13] Like other Dylan compositions that the band had covered, such as "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "All I Really Want to Do", the song was intended to be the A-side of a single.
George Harrison and Paul McCartney of the Beatles attended the Byrds' recording of the song on September 1, 1965, at Columbia's studios on Sunset Boulevard.
[15][17] Columbia Records originally pressed thousands of cover sleeves for the intended single, but the Byrds' manager, Jim Dickson, asked for the release to be dropped because of the group's dissatisfaction, most vocally expressed by David Crosby; Dickson originally thought the song would have made a strong single.
[19][20] The Byrds performed the song on the U.S. television program Hullabaloo, but it failed to make a long-term impact.
According to the same database, the song has been recorded in at least 14 other languages, such as Catalán, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Serbian, Spanish, and Swedish.
[26] In 2009, the filmmaker Michael Moore sang the third verse of the song live on The Jay Leno Show after being told that he had to "earn" a clip from his film Capitalism: A Love Story to be shown.
Bragg sang lyrics such as "Accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone/For the climate is obviously changing," and "But the man in the White House says no one's to blame/For the times, they are a-changing back.