Dylan narrated and starred in the commercial, saying "When it's made here, it's made with the one thing you can't import from anywhere else—American pride . Keith Negus, in a 2021 essay on Bob Dylan's single releases, praised his vocal performance on the track for being perfectly married to the subject matter of the song: "The deceptively quirky production of a lilting, minor-key, country-blues shuffle enhances the way Dylan delivers the lyrics in keeping with the character's world-weariness and increasingly stoned and cynical outlook. Henley added: “I was driving around one day, and I’d never heard it before, and I thought to myself, ‘Wow, somebody is really doin’ a good Bob Dylan. According to Gray, Eddy's producer Lee Hazlewood heard one Texan say to another, "Your girl has a face like forty miles of bad road", and immediately recognised the remark's potential as a song title. These themes align with Dylan’s recurrent motifs and offer a poignant reflection on personal experiences, seamlessly integrating into the context of Wonder Boys.

The lyrics make reference to "dancing lessons", "the jitterbug rag" and dressing "in drag", all of which feature in the plot of the film. The beauty of ‘Things Have Changed’ is its simplicity, from its initial creation right through to its sound. Ultimate Classic Rock critic Matthew Wilkening rated it as the 2nd best song Dylan recorded between 1992 and 2011, saying that it "occupies a nearly perfect middle ground between 1997's pessimistic ' Time Out of Mind' and the then yet-to-be released, more hopeful 2001 album ' Love and Theft'. For Henley, Dylan is “the quintessential enigmatic character” who’s been able to “maintain a certain mystery that he cultivated from the very beginning”. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience.Among the very first was country singer Waylon Jennings who made it a staple of his final live shows in 2000 and 2001.

Brian Hiatt, writing in Rolling Stone, where the song placed first on a 2020 list of "The 25 Best Bob Dylan Songs of the 21st Century", saw it as a stylistic about-face from 1997's Daniel Lanois-produced Time Out of Mind and the beginning of an important new chapter in Dylan's career: "The effortless feel of the playful-yet-ominous, hard-grooving, utterly dazzling 'Things Have Changed' was an early indication of the renewed friskiness of Dylan’s 21st-century work — and the vividly live-in-the studio creations he would achieve as his own producer, with the help of engineer Chris Shaw". De Graaf notes the images of "the last train", "all hell may break loose", "standing on the gallows with my head in a noose", all contributing to a sense of impending Armageddon: "the last battle of the end times when all powers from hell will explode in one final outburst of violence".Dylan also made a surprise televised appearance to perform the song at the American Film Institute Awards 2009 where Wonder Boys star Michael Douglas received the Lifetime Achievement award. And that was pretty funny, because the very last thing Bob did was raise the shaker up like 10db, making it ridiculously loud, and that was the mix he wanted to go with". The video appears on the bonus DVD included in the Limited Edition version of Dylan's 2006 album Modern Times. As he explained to Uncut, "We did 'Things Have Changed' in one afternoon, and when we were done we did a very quick mix of it, and I thought it was just going to be a rough mix to give to Bob who’d maybe give it to someone else, like Daniel Lanois, who’d wind up engineering and mixing the final thing. I knew it was in the movie "Wonder Boys," which I watched last night (The movie is OK - the song is the best part).