There’s a moment in Change Your Mind when the chorus drifts by like a half-remembered dream, a lullaby with a bitter undertow. The groove is deceptively soft, a slow, swaying rhythm that rocks you like a mother calming a restless child — but listen closer, and it’s less a lullaby and more a dirge. Mark Cassius, the man behind Neo Stereo, knows how to sweeten the poison, how to dress a barbed sentiment in silken harmonies, and here he doesit with the patience of someone who’s seen the world turn a few too many times. Cassius’s voice is both warm and distant, as if he’s singing from somewhere just out of reach.
He opens with “Early morning and I feel this way / Times a changing and I have to say,” a line that hangs in the air like a sigh, the kind you let out when you realise that change isn’t coming — it’s already here. The verse rolls forward, building around a gentle, pulsing drum groove that keeps the song floating in that uneasy space between melancholy and hope. There’s a hint of 70s AM radio here, echoes of The Band’s wistful Americana, of Neil Young’s ragged optimism, but Cassius tempers it with a contemporary sheen, a sonic polish that gleams just enough to distract you from the lyrical storm clouds gathering overhead.
The bridge is where the weight of it all comes into focus — a descending chord change that sweeps the floor out from under you, as if Cassius is pulling the rug on his own sense of certainty. But it’s the refrain that delivers the sting: “Change your looks, change your smile / I don’t know and I wonder why.” It’s a line that feels both personal and universal, the kind of lyric that cuts through the surface of the song and reaches for something deeper — the fear that all our attempts to change the world around us are just distractions from the things we can’t change inside ourselves.
For all its warmth and honeyed harmonies, Change Your Mind is less a call to action than a gentle reminder that the real battle is always within. It’s the sound of a man watching the world go by, trying to convince himself that changing his mind might just be enough.
