Filmmaker David Lynch quoted the song in his daily "weather report" on November 18, 2020: "This morning I woke up thinking of the line, 'People are crazy and times are strange', this line from the song 'Things Have Changed' by the great Bob Dylan". His voice has changed; it has continued to change throughout his career, and is a true and often personal reflection of the man at that time. When reflecting on iconic songs, it’s common to assume that their creation was a painstaking process, with artists meticulously refining lyrics and arrangements over an extended period until the whole thing is near-perfect. Lynch referenced the song for a second time on his June 1, 2021, weather report: "Today I was thinking about Bob Dylan and his song 'Things Have Changed'".

Clinton Heylin, in his account of Dylan's songs between 1974 and 2008, believes the song was recorded at Sony Studios, New York, probably on July 25 and 26, 1999. 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.This makes it his ninth most frequently performed live song ever and the only Dylan song since the 1970s on the list of his top 10 most performed songs. Like Tom Waits, you'll either love or hate his voice, but if you can feel beyond you will appreciate and understand more readily what you find.

Clinton Heylin has written that "Things Have Changed" demonstrates a close knowledge of the film Wonder Boys, for which it was written. According to Olof Björner, "Things Have Changed" was recorded in May 1999 at Sterling Sound studios in New York. As of December 8, 2019, the date of its most recent outing, Dylan has performed the song 1,060 times.

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". It is nothing outstanding, but is a welcome addition to the scarcity of commercially-available live tracks. 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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.

Dylan critic Michael Gray has commented on the wide range of cultural resources in the song's lyrics, describing it as unique in the way it synthesises the worlds of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Duane Eddy. 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 . A live version from Portsmouth, England was included on the live album Live 1961–2000: Thirty-Nine Years of Great Concert Performances. 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. Dylan critic Kees de Graaf places "Things Have Changed" in the context of the Biblical teaching Dylan encountered when he studied with the Vineyard Fellowship in the late 1970s.

But when the studio recording could not be located, it was replaced by a live version recorded in Portland, Oregon, on June 15, 2000.