Since about 15 people itt have all said the same thing, it's starting to bother me a bit.

"The Japanese R sound is somewhere between an R and L as English-speakers know them."

This is true assuming you're talking specifically about Standard Japanese, as spoken on the national news network NHK and in Tokyo. This is equivalent to defining American English by the GenAm dialect based on rural Ohio and used by newscasters all over the country, or defining British English by the Received Pronunciation likewise used by news anchors, educated Londoners, and almost no one else.

So, in Tokyo, no, 変わりたい does not use a hard R. Go to Osaka, and all the L ish character of the sound is gone--you have a hard R (at least in casual speech). Some dialects pronounce the R so hard in certain contexts that it's actually a full-on alveolar stop (a D). Others barely even touch the tongue to the top of the mouth and you end up with a weak L sound.

Source: have studied Japanese for a decade, am a Linguist, taught English in Osaka