Nearly ten months ago, I made the executive decision: I would post all songs with titles beginning with "The" in the Ts instead of ignoring the article, as standard alphabetization rules require. The addition of "The" to a title is significant. It is by far the most popular article used in song titles, with reason. It is a statement, a stand, a definition. This is not to mention its importance in bands' names themselves.
It's not "the Changeling." It's "The Changeling."
We don't like "the Doors." We like "The Damned Doors."
So here begins my definitive series of "The" songs, the songs willing to cast a hard spotlight on all manner of themes in stark definition.
"The Changeling"
First of all, this brilliant little song was clearly ripped off by "Funkytown" a decade later. Recognize.
Great, funky tune, with the band cooking and Jim Morrison in a silly little mood. He was so bored with stardom at this point, the last Doors album, why not start off the album with some sarcastic bellows and howls? Generations later, a kid named Julian Casablancas, who idolized the Doors, would make the same kind of careless noise in many of his songs, but "New York City Cops" (also on this list) especially.
Lyrically, there is just one repeated verse, and it emphasizes how little Morrison is tied to any sense of a single identity. He can live uptown; he can live downtown. He can have money; he can have none. None of it affects who he thinks he is, or his freedom in any state to just "leave town." There is no attachment in his life, which is usually something I admire, but it proved to be a tragic flaw.
The use of the word "The" in the title is ironic, because such a definitive term is paired with the concept of a changeling, which appropriately can have a few definitions. Traditionally, a changeling was (per Wikipedia) "believed to be a fairy child that had been left in place of a human child stolen by the fairies." I've also heard the term referring to a mythical shapeshifter. In either case, the term is the absolute antithesis of definitive order.
In the first sense of the term, it's easy to see how Morrison felt switched at birth, the artistic son of a high-level military man. In the second sense, that of the shapeshifter, he seems to declare how his resistance to definition is exactly what defines him. He may have mixed the two themes also, the superstitious paranoia of the first definition and the idea that paranoia's fear can take infinitely multiple forms. With legal problems making him kind of a social pariah at this point in his career, Morrison might've been attacking pop culture for fearing him to the point that he became pervasive: in the air they breathed, the food they ate. In those Cold War times, it was an impulse for which the populace was well trained. And regardless of point in history, people love a crowd and tend to distrust someone who doesn't choose sides, who refrains from extremes, remains an unknown quantity. It's a multifaceted idea he played with, using efficiently few words, most important of which are the two in the title.
Unfortunately, when he did eventually leave town, he ended up losing himself beyond the plane of mortality.
It almost would be Grecian myth, if this didn't involve just a real person who could sing and got into the news a lot, whose young body had to be lifted out of stale bathwater.