Dante Shivers Finishes a Fifteen-Year-Old Song While Living Its Question on "Changes"

A ballerina's shoes hanging near a London window, a conversation about unlived dreams, a young songwriter awake while she slept, that's the actual origin of "Changes," and Dante Shivers didn't touch the finished lyrics again for nearly fifteen years afterward. He wrote the song in two cities, started in London and completed in New York, only to shelve it entirely once it was done.

That long silence matters more than a simple delay in release. Shivers has said the song's core question, whether the two people in that conversation would ever actually pursue the lives they imagined for themselves, sat unanswered for him personally during those fifteen years too. He didn't finish recording "Changes" until he was traveling the world on his own journey of rediscovery, completing it in Thailand, thousands of miles from where the story started.

That gap between writing and recording gives the song an unusual authenticity. Rather than performing a feeling he'd only imagined as a younger man, Shivers finished "Changes" while genuinely living the uncertainty it describes, chasing a life he wasn't sure he'd ever reach, which turns the song's lyrics into something closer to a real-time report than a retrospective one.

Shivers works across alternative rock, blues, and folk without settling permanently into any single lane, letting each song's emotional needs shape its arrangement rather than forcing a consistent sonic identity. That flexibility suits "Changes" well, since the track carries a story spanning multiple countries and over a decade of personal change.

"Changes" asks listeners to sit with the discomfort of not knowing whether a dream will ever arrive, and Shivers earns that vulnerability honestly, closing a fifteen-year gap between the person who wrote the song and the person who finally believed enough in its ending to finish it.