On paper, it looked like a mismatch. In one corner: Eric Clapton, 51 years old, the British blues-rock elder statesman, fresh from the acoustic triumph of Unplugged. In the other: Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, the smooth R&B hitmaker behind Boyz II Men and Toni Braxton. Between them stood a gentle love song written by three Nashville songwriters who were never in the same room when they wrote it — and first recorded by a country singer. The result, “Change the World”, spent 13 weeks at number one, stayed on the charts for well over a year, and swept the Grammy Awards. It was Clapton’s last great pop hit, and it belonged as much to its writers and producer as to him.
Three Writers, One Year, No Room Together
“Change the World” was assembled slowly and at a distance. During an early-1990s demo session at Quad Studios in Nashville, bassist Tommy Sims played his collaborators Wayne Kirkpatrick and Gordon Kennedy a fragment he had been carrying: a title, a chord progression and the beginnings of a melody. Months later, Kirkpatrick asked for a tape of the idea and wrote the chorus lyric and most of the second verse. The song then went dormant again until Kennedy retrieved it, finished the music, and cut a demo with Sims in Columbus, Ohio, where Sims was working on a church choir album.
Driving home from that session, Kennedy listened to the track and dictated the remaining words — the first verse and the one missing line of the second — into a handheld recorder. “I still have the micro-cassette!” he later told American Songwriter. Back home, he sang the finished demo himself: the very recording Clapton would eventually hear. As Kennedy put it, “None of the three of us were together when we wrote what we each wrote on the song.” All told, the writing took about a year.
Wynonna Got There First
The first artist to record it was not Clapton at all. Country star Wynonna Judd cut “Change the World” for her album Revelations, her third studio album, released in February 1996, in a neo-traditional country arrangement lasting just over three minutes. Judd’s reading is a fine record that almost nobody heard — a reminder that in the mid-1990s a song’s fate depended less on being recorded than on being recorded by the right person, in the right arrangement, at the right moment. The songwriters would have to wait for all three. Judd never released her version as a single, and it might have remained an album track had the song not been pitched for a film: Phenomenon, the John Travolta drama about a small-town mechanic whose brush with a mysterious light turns him into a genius, needed music for its soundtrack, which was being produced by Robbie Robertson. The song’s lyric — an ordinary man dreaming that love might make him extraordinary — fitted the film’s premise almost too neatly, and it was Clapton, an artist in the middle of an unlikely second act as an acoustic balladeer, who was asked to sing it.
Babyface Puts the Blues In
Clapton’s instincts on hearing the demo were characteristically double-edged. “When I heard Tommy Sims’ demo, I could hear Paul McCartney doing that,” he told Mojo magazine in 2013, “so I needed to, with greatest respect to Paul, take that and put it somewhere black. So I asked Babyface who, even though he may not be aware of it, gave it the blues thing.” And, as always, Clapton paid his dues to the source: “The first two lines I play on that song on the acoustic guitar are lines I quote wherever I can, and they come from the beginning of ‘Mannish Boy’ by Muddy Waters… it has to have one foot in the blues, even if it’s subtly disguised.”
Most of the recording was made at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, with a rhythm section of the first rank: John “JR” Robinson on drums, Dean Parks on acoustic guitar, Nathan East on bass, Michael Thompson on guitar, Greg Phillinganes on synthesizers and Luis Conte on percussion. East recalled that the sessions were jam-packed, because half the music business wanted to work with Babyface at the time — but Clapton and this song came first. The single was released on 8 July 1996, backed with a Clapton-produced Irish traditional, “Danny Boy”.
A Record That Wouldn’t Leave the Charts
“Change the World” climbed to number five on the Billboard Hot 100, where it stayed on the chart for 43 weeks, reached number four on the Cash Box chart and number two on the Mainstream Top 40, and it topped the singles chart in Canada. Its real kingdom, though, was adult contemporary radio: the single spent 13 weeks at number one on Billboard‘s Adult Contemporary chart and remained on that chart for 81 weeks — over a year and a half — a feat that was extraordinarily rare at the time and helped prompt Billboard to create a separate recurrent chart for songs that refused to go away. It also topped the Adult Top 40 chart, and in Billboard‘s year-end reckoning for 1996 it finished at number two on the Adult Top 40 list and number seven among adult contemporary songs. The RIAA certified it gold within three months, and by August 1997 it had sold nearly 900,000 copies in the United States alone. In total, the song reached the top 40 in twenty countries, and it remained in charts somewhere in the world for two consecutive years.
Part of its stealth was structural. Beneath Babyface’s gloss, the record is built like the blues Clapton insisted on smuggling in: the verses circle a progression in E major decorated with the sixth and seventh chords of his acoustic vocabulary, while the guitar solo — the moment the singer’s longing finally overflows — is played squarely on an E minor blues scale before resolving into major-key release. It is, in effect, two of Clapton’s careers in a single track: the folk-pop craftsman on the surface, the Muddy Waters disciple underneath.
At the 39th Grammy Awards in February 1997, the song completed its sweep: Record of the Year, Song of the Year for Sims, Kennedy and Kirkpatrick, and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for Clapton. It collected eight awards in all, including Nashville’s Song of the Year, ASCAP and BMI honours for the most performed song from a film, and a nomination for Best Song from a Movie at the MTV Movie Awards; the RIAA later placed it at number 270 on its Songs of the Century list. For Babyface, whose productions had defined the sound of 1990s R&B, the record was a crossover coronation of a different kind — proof that his touch worked as surely on a 51-year-old English bluesman with a Martin acoustic as on any of his R&B stars. For the three songwriters, who had written their parts in separate cities and never once sat in a room together, Song of the Year was the industry’s highest possible verdict on a song assembled by post, tape and instinct.
The win also quietly rewrote three careers. Sims, already one of Nashville’s most respected bassists, became a producer and songwriter in demand far beyond the gospel world where he had started. Kennedy remained a fixture of the Music Row writing rooms. Kirkpatrick’s path was the most unexpected: two decades later he carried the same craft to Broadway, co-writing the songs for the hit musical Something Rotten! and earning a Tony nomination for its score. That a Song of the Year had been assembled by three men mailing fragments to one another — a process that in the 1990s looked like an accident of busy schedules — now reads like an early sketch of how much modern songwriting would come to work: remotely, in pieces, across genres and state lines.
The Lyric Nobody Could Agree On
Success did not make the song critic-proof. Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s lyricist, used it as his example of a song that triumphs despite its words: “What sold that song, I believe, is production. And it had a good melody. But don’t listen to the lyrics. Because the lyric is appalling… that’s not what sold the song.” Billboard‘s Larry Flick heard it differently, writing of the Clapton–Babyface pairing: “one listen to this positively electric single, and you will be hoping for the two to collaborate on an entire album.” AllMusic’s Matthew Greenwald praised its “folksy melodic hook and soulful turnaround,” handled by Clapton “with honesty and an artless grace.”
Whoever was right, “Change the World” closed an era. It was Clapton’s sixth — and last — top ten single on the Billboard Hot 100, a quarter of a century after “Layla” first cracked that chart, and it anchored his best-of collection Clapton Chronicles in 1999. A song written by three men in three places, first sung by a country star and finished off by the king of R&B slow jams, had become the definitive sound of Eric Clapton’s fifties: the guitar hero, grown mellow, still insisting that even the sweetest pop record keep one foot in the blues.