Ten Years After – I’d Love To Change The World

I heard this song Saturday and knew I had to move it into Sunday’s post. I’ve heard this song many times over the years, but sometimes a song catches you differently on a particular day. I love that acoustic opening, and then Alvin Lee’s electric guitar comes cutting through it. His playing always had a sound of its own.

Ten Years After formed in England in the 1960s with Alvin Lee, Leo Lyons, Ric Lee, and Chick Churchill. They came out of the British blues scene, but they could stretch far beyond straight blues. Alvin Lee became the obvious focal point because of his guitar playing. Their appearance at Woodstock in 1969, particularly their performance of I’m Going Home, introduced the band to a much larger American audience.

I’d Love To Change The World was written by Alvin Lee and released on the 1971 album A Space in Time. It became their best-known song in America and reached the Top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album was also a change for the band. There was more emphasis on songs and acoustic textures instead of the extended blues workouts they had become known for.

What I like about the song is the contrast. It starts quietly with that acoustic guitar while Lee sings about a world filled with division, inequality and confusion. Then the electric guitar enters and changes the entire atmosphere. His guitar doesn’t overwhelm the song. It answers it. Lee was known for playing incredibly fast, but this is a good example of why speed wasn’t the only thing he had going for him.

I hear this song, and I’m transported to the sixties. Guitarist Alvin Lee wrote and sang it. It peaked at #40 on the Billboard 100 and #10 in Canada. It’s been in many movies and TV shows. When I think of Ten Years After, I think of Woodstock and them playing “I’m Going Home” and Alvin Lee playing his guitar like it’s on fire…plus this one.

I’d Love To Change The World is over fifty years old now. Unfortunately, we still haven’t figured out what to do. Maybe that’s why it still sounds so good.

I’d Love To Change The World

Everywhere is freaks and hairies
Dykes and fairies, tell me where is sanity
Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no rich no more?

I’d love to change the world
But I don’t know what to do
So I’ll leave it up to you

Population keeps on breeding
Nation bleeding, still more feeding economy
Life is funny, skies are sunny
Bees make honey, who needs money, Monopoly

I’d love to change the world
But I don’t know what to do
So I’ll leave it up to you

World pollution, there’s no solution
Institution, electrocution
Just black and white, rich or poor
Them and us, stop the war

I’d love to change the world
But I don’t know what to do
So I’ll leave it up to you

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Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, Alternative music, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player. Not the slightest bit interested in politics at all.

30 thoughts on “Ten Years After – I’d Love To Change The World”

      1. I’m about to move into my own apartment thanks to the SSVF (VA) here in Jacksonville. I’m starting substitute teaching in Charter & Private schools here in Jacksonville tomorrow. Things are looking up for me after suffering through almost 6-months of living in the homeless shelter & then the veterans transitional housing unit. God is good (great)…all the time!

        Carl

        On Sun, Aug 23, 2026 at 11:54 AM PowerPop… An Eclectic Collection of Pop

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  3. Cool! Ten Years After are one of those bands I’ve been aware of for decades. I think I first heard them when I got the three-record set “Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More” many moons ago. It includes “I’m Going Home.” I’m not sure I had heard “I’d Love To Change The World” – love it!

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  6. Classic rock in the truest sense. Great lyrics (still meaningful today), tune and guitar. I found it difficult to believe when I first looked into this song that it only reached #40, for one week here. It seemed such a well-known and remembered hit

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  8. Haunting song. Heard it a lot on oldies radio, then I bought some cassette compilation that it was on. A few years back, a song of his came up on a playlist, “The Bluest Blues”, which George Harrison guested on. Incredible song. Two masters going at it. Good post.

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  9. Definitely a product of its time, and the song is still representing that time quite well even after all these years. Hypnotic, thoughtful moments and straight-forward, all-in rock all in one.

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  10. oh…um, at one time, every time you saw someone with a guitar, or borrowed mine, three songs, Stairway, Smoke on the Water, or this…good tune, but that habit ruined it for me….I can into the Ten Year world with Rock and Roll Music to the World…Chu Chu Mama, Lee was the speed demon…

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    1. I totally get it…for some reason I never heard this played a lot…but those other two….YES…YES…and did I mention? YES. There should be a law about not playing Stairway to Heaven in a music store.

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  11. Usually, if I don’t like the music, I won’t bother to say anything. I didn’t like I’m Going Home. I’m enough of a fan of music to list faster guitar players I like better(Albert Lee anyone?). I recognized I’d Love To Change The World as the efforts of the promotion department of their new record company. Not my cuppa, I fear.

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  12. This is the perfect hippy generation song, Max as it captures the issues that were troubling people in the late sixty’s and early seventies like war, pollution, and poverty along with the human desire of wanting to fix the world, but being too overwhelmed to know where to start.

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