Love - Forever Changes

One of the first pop albums to become a cult classic, Forever Changes is Love's 1967 masterpiece. This album is considered the pinnacle of the LA freak scene. Singer/songwriter Arthur Lee's lyrics are increasingly fragmentary and paranoid, foreshadowing the band's eventual drug-fueled collapse.

Despite this, the drop-dead hip tunes are set in arrangements featuring Herb Alpert-style mariachi horns, lush middle-of-the-road strings, and other tropes of the easy listening scene. This creates a more unsettling sense of tension than if the songs were given the usual heavy rock instrumentation.

Every single track on this album is a stone classic. Forever Changes belongs high on any halfway serious list of the greatest pop albums of the '60s.