The record
At a glance
- Artist
- The Incredible String Band
- Released
- November 1969
- Album
- Fifth studio album
- Original tracks
- Six
- Label
- Elektra EKS-74057
- Producer
- Joe Boyd
Why it matters
The moment an expanding circle becomes the band on the cover
Changing Horses turns the Incredible String Band's gradual personnel expansion into an explicit four-member identity. Licorice McKechnie and Rose Simpson are not incidental visitors: both are credited throughout the album and all four musicians appear together on the front sleeve. The six-track design is radically different from the preceding eighteen-track double album, concentrating each LP side around one composition lasting roughly a quarter of an hour. White Bird and Creation use duration differently: Heron's piece expands song sections and ensemble color, while Williamson's finale approaches cosmogony through a sequence of changing vocal and instrumental episodes.
Electric guitar, Hammond organ, bass and guest keyboards enter without replacing flute, sarangi, Chinese banjo, gimbri, violin, sitar, mandolin and hand percussion. The record therefore documents change as rebalancing, not a simple conversion from acoustic folk to electric rock. Its number-thirty British peak shows that the band retained a chart audience even as the material became less immediately celebrated than its 1968 predecessors. The album matters as a hinge: it formalizes the quartet and prepares the more collective stage and record projects of 1970.
London, 1969
After the double album, a six-track change of scale
The 1967-68 albums had transformed the Incredible String Band from the name of an Edinburgh folk trio into the vehicle for Williamson and Heron's increasingly open writing. McKechnie first became audible as a selected singer and percussionist; Simpson joined the recorded ensemble across Wee Tam and the Big Huge. That double album had used eighteen pieces and four sides to accommodate miniature songs, long meditations and a large instrumental vocabulary. During summer 1969, the group returned to Sound Techniques with Joe Boyd producing and John Wood engineering.
Changing Horses reduced the track count to six while making McKechnie and Simpson part of the credited group texture. Ivan Pawle of Dr. Strangely Strange added organ and piano to Creation, and Walter Grundy added harmonica to Big Ted. Elektra issued an edited Big Ted as a UK single before the album, backed by All Writ Down. The album followed in November 1969 under catalogue number EKS-74057.
The quartet emerges
Four members, two guests and precisely allocated instruments
Williamson writes Big Ted, Mr. & Mrs. and Creation alone and shares Dust Be Diamonds with Heron, giving him the principal vocal role on four tracks. His instrument allocation is composition-specific: piano and washboard shape Big Ted, flute, sarangi and Chinese banjo belong to White Bird's ensemble, and gimbri and violin help distinguish Creation. Heron writes and leads White Bird and writes Sleepers, Awake!, while his co-credit on Dust Be Diamonds prevents the album from dividing cleanly into two separate author portfolios. McKechnie's organ, guitar, kazoo, percussion and voices are integrated across the programme; her role is broader than the backing-vocal label alone suggests.
Simpson's bass gives the quartet a more continuous low register than the previous albums, and her vocals and percussion expand the group sound beyond that function. Pawle appears only on the closing track, adding keyboard weight to Creation rather than joining the standing lineup. Grundy's harmonica is similarly bounded to Big Ted and should not be generalized across the record. Boyd and Wood balance amplified and acoustic sources so that electric guitar and Hammond read as additional colors rather than a replacement aesthetic.
Changing textures
Electric accents inside an acoustic and vocal language
Big Ted begins with piano, washboard, electric guitar and harmonica around Williamson's character song, establishing a more visibly collective performance. White Bird then occupies most of the first side, unfolding through Heron's lead vocal, acoustic guitar and a changing ensemble of flute, sarangi, Chinese banjo, organ and group voices. Dust Be Diamonds closes the side by concentrating shared authorship into electric guitar, Hammond organ, vibraphone and kazoo color.
Sleepers, Awake! begins side two as the album's shortest track, using its compact call to attention as a reset after the first side's extended span.
Mr. & Mrs. makes domestic partnership a theatrical scene, with Williamson's electric guitar and McKechnie's organ supporting contrasting vocal presence. Creation uses sixteen minutes to enlarge from gimbri, sitar, mandolin and percussion into violin and keyboard episodes. The two long tracks are not interchangeable: White Bird extends a song across the first side, while Creation functions as a deliberately terminal sequence. Across all six pieces, repetition is punctuated by timbral handovers, so the quartet's changing instrumental roles become the album's principal arranging method.
Track guide
Six pieces: two long journeys and four counterweights
Big Ted
Williamson opens with a named character rather than a cosmic abstraction. Piano, washboard, electric guitar and Grundy's harmonica make the portrait earthy and mobile; the later single edit confirms the album performance was the more expansive original version.
White Bird
Heron's fourteen-minute centerpiece occupies most of side one. Recurring vocal material passes through flute, sarangi, Chinese banjo, organ and shared voices, making the bird an axis for changing ensemble perspectives rather than a pretext for an instrumental solo.
Dust Be Diamonds
The only co-written track closes the first side. Electric guitar, Hammond, vibraphone and kazoo convert the title's transformation of matter into bright, compact texture, compressing collaboration after White Bird's long unfolding.
Sleepers, Awake!
Heron's shortest song opens side two with an imperative. Its concise shape works as a threshold: attention is summoned again before the domestic scene and long creation sequence that follow.
Mr. & Mrs.
Williamson places a paired social title at the center of the second side. Electric guitar, organ, percussion and multiple voices turn relationship into dialogue and performance, giving ordinary partnership as much imaginative space as birds or cosmology.
Creation
Williamson's sixteen-minute finale treats creation as process rather than a single narrated event. Gimbri, sitar, mandolin, violin, percussion and Pawle's keyboards enter in changing combinations; the piece closes the album by continually remaking its own scale.
Six separate worlds
Creatures, partnership, waking and the making of a world
Changing Horses is not a unified concept album; its six titles instead form a sequence of beings, materials, social relation, waking and origin. Big Ted and White Bird begin with named living presences, one individualized and earthbound, the other given enough duration to become a changing field of perception. Dust Be Diamonds frames transformation as a verbal command, linking ordinary matter to imagined radiance.
Sleepers, Awake! turns listening into an active state rather than a passive transition between sides.
Mr. & Mrs. brings the scale back to a pair and allows domestic relation to remain complicated rather than idealized. Creation then expands from persons and creatures toward the making of a world, but its changing sections resist one fixed theological summary. The album title accurately describes personnel and musical movement, yet it does not provide a plot shared by all six songs. Its deepest continuity lies in transformation: instruments, voices, durations and points of view repeatedly exchange functions.
Elektra 74057
Four musicians together in Janet Shankman's tree portrait
Changing Horses was issued in a gatefold sleeve under Elektra catalogue number EKS-74057. Janet Shankman's front photograph shows Williamson, Heron, McKechnie and Simpson together in a tree. That four-person image matters because it publicly presents the expanded ensemble as the band rather than picturing only the two principal writers.
William S. Harvey received the cover-design credit.
The back cover prints lyrics for Creation alongside individual song credits. The gatefold contains artwork by Williamson and Heron, integrating the two principal writers' visual contributions without separating the six-track programme into personal halves.
A one-week UK chart entry
Number thirty in Britain, with a brief chart stay
Elektra released Changing Horses in November 1969. An edited Big Ted had appeared as a UK single in October with All Writ Down on the reverse, but it did not enter the singles chart. The album reached number thirty on the UK album chart and remained listed for one week.
In the United States it reached number 166 on the Billboard album chart. Those positions show continued reach but a shorter British chart life than The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. Retrospective criticism has often treated the album as less consistent than the celebrated 1968 records, while singling out the scope of White Bird and Creation.
The fifth record
A transitional record that refuses to repeat 1968
Changing Horses is best understood as a transitional album with its own six-track architecture, not as a failed attempt to remake the preceding double LP. Its cover and credits establish McKechnie and Simpson as part of the band's public and musical identity. White Bird and Creation develop a two-anchor LP structure that is much more concentrated than Wee Tam and the Big Huge. Electric guitar, Hammond and bass anticipate a broader group language without erasing the acoustic instruments that made the earlier catalogue distinctive.
The guest roles remain disciplined: Grundy changes the opening texture and Pawle changes the finale, but neither is mistaken for a permanent member. The album's uneven critical reputation makes precise listening more useful than inherited ranking. Its long forms show two different methods at once: Heron sustains a central image, while Williamson constructs a terminal sequence of transformations. As the bridge into the 1970 quartet period, it records change before that change had settled into one repeatable style.
Original programme
Preserve the original three-and-three sides
The original album contains six tracks. Three tracks occupy each LP side. Dust Be Diamonds closes side one. Creation is the sixteen-minute original ending.
The album version of Big Ted is longer than the contemporary single edit. Dust Be Diamonds is credited jointly to Heron and Williamson. Pawle appears only on Creation. Grundy appears only on Big Ted.
A listening path
Use White Bird and Creation as the two side horizons
- Enter through Big Ted's compact character ensemble.
- Give White Bird its full first-side duration.
- Hear Dust Be Diamonds compress collaboration into bright electric color.
- Restart with the brief waking call.
- Let Mr. & Mrs. return the scale to human partnership.
- Take Creation as a complete sixteen-minute ending.
- Compare the two long pieces by structure, not length alone.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- Official six-track digital programme — Apple Music / Elektra
- Original catalogue, sides, writers and production — Elektra Records Master Discography
- Track list, credits and retrospective assessment — AllMusic
- Original release record and six-track sequence — MusicBrainz
- Original side division and catalogue detail — 45worlds / 45cat
- Official UK chart history — Official Charts Company
- US album chart history — Billboard
- Sound Techniques album archive — Sound Techniques