Premiere: Kirby Sybert floats on ‘The Winds of Change’ with live performance clip

Change is all around us. Even if you can’t see it for the fire and smoke, it’s there, almost an omnipresent force like gravity in our everyday lives. Whether your standing still or in the thick of some forward motion, significant mutations, both good and bad, are happening. Sometimes, it comes down like a gushing waterfall over jagged rock; other times, perhaps now in this very moment in time, it is small precipitative drips, slowly puddling at your fingertips and toes. Picking up his acoustic guitar, harkening to Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan, Philly singer-songwriter Kirby Sybert mounts a timely performance with his song “The Winds of Change,” navigating personal and global matters of heart, troubled waters and true kindness.

Filmed at SoFar Charlotte at a Camp 4 Heroes event, honoring veterans and reconnecting them with each other and themselves, post-war, the visual (thanks to Jake Rothwell’s handy work) is a masterfully shot and delivered moment of resolve. Sybert’s voice towers over the audience, switching gears between lilting as a songbird and gnawing at the sky for freedom. The potent performer is joined by musicians Jordan Caiola and Shane Woods of Mo Lowda & the Humble, with whom Sybert has been on tour scouring the corners of the country over the past year. “The song is a reminder, a reminder of change, the only true constant. It’s that reminder to enjoy what’s happening right now because there’s no hiding that it’s going to change in some way,” Sybert tells B-Sides & Badlands, premiering the essential performance time-piece today.

“The Winds of Change” cracks like thunder and shatters the bones with a message as relevant as it is evergreen, feeling eerie yet enlightening. “It was one of those tunes where the chorus just came to me at some point in a late night writing session back home in Philadelphia. It’s anthemic quality just poured out of me, but I didn’t have any verses,” says Sybert, whose charm oozes on camera but doesn’t dilute the emotional punches. In fact, his careful, peaceful approach heightens its importance. “I had been on tour with Mo Lowda & the Humble in the fall of last year, and we had some days off in Austin. I had shown Jordan and Shane this tune, still with really only the chorus, and I wanted Jordan to write a verse. So, after having some brisket at our friends place we sat down and just sang it, and the verses came along and then we had a three-part harmony to the chorus; it just felt like it wrote itself. So, then we started playing it on the road.”

Sybert calls the viewer into his new-found serenity ring, as he breathes in the raging seas, swallows it down and just lets it soak and replenish his entire body. “I made a joke that it’d be funny if Beto O’Rourke used it for his presidential campaign song, as he had just lost a close race with Ted Cruz in Texas. The song is about confronting the change in life and opening yourself to that change,” he adds. “We all know it’s going to happen so why not embrace it. It’s been a reminder for me that life is constantly in flux and to be present in the moment, I hope the listener can feel that, too.”

“The Winds of Change” follows on the heels of last December’s “My Maker” debut.

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