Polygram released this album in CD form in 1995, together with a Chinese compilation of Tracy's hits during that time.
When I first listened to CHANGES, I disliked it to the extent that I did not want to listen to it again. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what I found unattractive about the album as a whole. First of all, the selection of songs was noticeably different from the selections in her UFO albums: the songs in CHANGES were generally more upbeat and faster. Also, they are not as easy to listen to as those from the UFO period. While the songs from UFO were more predictable and standard, those from CHANGES were more idiosyncratic and whimsical, therefore making them more difficult to immediately accept. Secondly, Tracy's singing styles were very different in both periods. While her style was more natural sounding and textured during her UFO days, her style in Polygram sounded oddly metallic and adulterated, for instance, in DA DA DA. I felt that the original flavour of her voice has somehow been destroyed by the relentless and merciless butchery of the mixing process.
Listening to CHANGES a long time later, however, I began to understand its character more clearly. The choice of faster songs was deliberate, so as to inject a strong, spunky and catchy Western attitude to the album as a whole. Tracy's upfront and unreserved and breezy singing in many of the songs contribute much to make the album as authentically Western in sound as possible. From then on, I began to feel this voice of Tracy Huang become increasingly attractive and appealing: it has become tougher and more explosive; it has also taken on more edge and attitude, something unusual compared to her lush and richly feminine voice during her EMI days. The overall high-energy feel of the album is also very infectious, and very different from the sentimental ballads that Tracy once did in albums like FEELINGS.
Listening to CHANGES more closely, I saw that Tracy Huang had indeed taken a very large musical leap after she left EMI in the early 80s. Nowhere in her early days did we hear her voice burst into such adrenaline packed roars as what we hear in the explosive number, HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE RAIN. Tracy's voice here is highly exciting, unbridled and unrestrained, like the explosions of a hot flame.
In I'M ALL CONFUSED, Tracy radically attempted to sing a heavily rock influenced piece. Her voice screams with angst and intense desperation: "Should I, shouldn't I? Did we or didn't we? This is do or die for the life of me. I don't know how to choose; I know I've got to break loose, but I'm all confused". Tracy's voice contains a raw power, almost with a seething and brutal energy bubbling beneath it. However, I still think that Tracy's voice has been stretched a bit too much in this piece; her vocal texture is much too sweet and feminine and so is not exactly suitable for singing very rough rock numbers, which require a more smoky, dark and rugged singing voice. The overall result sounds as if Tracy is straining her voice badly to reach the high notes and inject more power into her singing. Despite these limitations, I feel that this is one of the more successful local English songs that Tracy has attempted in her career, because of the strong musicality of the number and its sheer intensity.
A second number that struck me is HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE RAIN. Here Tracy's voice is unbridled and touched with wildness, the closest she has come to simply letting her hair down and milking her powerhouse vocals for all that they're worth. Other numbers like ONCE BURNT TWICE SHY, THE MAGIC IN YOUR EYES, THESE EYES and CASABLANCA, also became more appealing upon repeated listening.
As a whole, it is a surprise to find that almost the whole album being dominated by fast and upbeat tracks. It is a rather unusual phenomena since in all her earlier albums, ballads are found in abundance. In CHANGES, by comparison, the only ballad is ALWAYS ON MY MIND. One therefore senses in CHANGES a Tracy Huang who is doing all that she can to decisively turn her back away from and reject the tried and tested formula that made her famous during her early days with EMI; she was attempting to create a total and radical revamp of her herself, from the icy sophisticated woman image portrayed on the album cover, complete with scarlet lipstick, to the new focus on adventurous numbers that listeners would not dream she would even dare to do.
Overall, this massive project of seeking a musical rebirth is successful because it opens a Pandora's box of myriad possibilities for Tracy Huang's musical career. However, this sudden and abruptly decisive cut with the simplicity of her past works is inevitably painful and baffling for many of her fans. More seriously, CHANGES, more than her earlier EMI albums, begins to reveal the mistakes that Tracy Huang inevitably makes as she unwisely selects songs that are unsuitable for her, or songs that are of dismal quality, in her ambitious attempts to be more innovative. The most major and glaring mistake in CHANGES is DA DA DA. The lyrics of this songs are puerile, banal and childish. Tracy's voice has been adulterated to such a large extent that she sounds almost artificially cheerful, like a plastic doll that is chirping Da da da in mindless and robotic fashion. The music is hopelessly primitive in sound, in its poor attempt at sophistication that falls flat in its face and jars on the ears; it is the same sort of discordant noise that tries to pass off as music that is found in the locally written songs in SECOND SIGHT: DOWN TO THE PARTY, LEAVE ME ALONE, ROCK N' ROLL THAT'S ALL. Overall, DA DA DA is an exercise in bad taste and bad judgement in the selection of songs: the song is like a gaudy doll decked out in her cheesy clothes and loud make-up, one that lacks flesh and blood.
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