"The Seeds of Love", the best work of Tears for Fears, is reissued in a Super Deluxe Edition. The eight album tracks are joined by 42 bonus tracks with demos, alternate versions and a complete new mix of the record, made by prog rock musician Steven Wilson. We talked to band leader Roland Orzabal about the meaning of "The Seeds of Love" then and now - as well as the next studio album, planned for 2021.
Mr. Orzabal, after the first two Tears for Fears albums, you and colleague Curt Smith were considered a synth-pop duo. Was it hard to convince the record company that you now wanted to record a sound reminiscent of the late sixties and the Beatles?
We had some problems, to say the least. But we had a good A&R man on our side, Dave Bates, and he had our backs. The album before "The Seeds of Love", "Songs from the Big Chair" from 1985 was enormously successful, worldwide.
It contained your biggest hits: "Shout" and "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" ...
... and the label wanted us to do "Songs from the Big Chair, Part 2". Nothing else. But we spent eight months alone promoting "Big Chair" or performing it on tour. The last thing we wanted was to do the same thing again. "The Seeds of Love" also didn't come out until four years later because it just took us a long time to figure out what direction we wanted to go in.
And then came the Beatles homage "Sowing The Seeds Of Love". You can't say that the 1980s was a decade in which the Fab Four were still on everyone's minds. The renaissance didn't start until 1995 with the "Anthology" albums.
I think the Europeans welcomed the Beatleesque sounds with open arms. They understood that we were reviving the spirit of that time. The "Summer of Love." This summer of love still existed in Great Britain around 1989 - our album fell into the era of rave culture, which was also approaching its peak at the end of the 1980s. We captured that feeling with "The Seeds of Love." Maybe it was a shock for Americans to hear the work. After all these years, Tears for Fears came back, and then I had grown my hair long, too. "What The Hell," they thought, "And Now They're Trying To Sound Like The Beatles!".
But the first single, "Sowing The Seeds Of Love," was a hit.
Yes, but it perhaps didn't boost the album the way they hoped it would in America. Still, we really wanted to leave the 1980s, that kind of pop, behind. We just weren't as enamored with the Top 40, the pop charts anymore. The sounds of the decade were becoming too superficial for us, especially towards the end. Curt and I were interested in artists from the 1960s and 1970s, so the Beatles, of course, but also Steely Dan, Little Feat and Pink Floyd. We wanted to be a little more like them. Take them as a benchmark. So remembering musicians who were also less often heard on the radio.
After all, the end of pop came, and the comeback of guitar music would be in the early 1990s. The opening song of your album, "Woman in Chains," also anticipated something - something that was rarely sung about in the 1980s: Turning the spotlight on domestic violence against women, and what to do about it.
Well, unfortunately, it's still been around for centuries: violence against women! For me, "Woman In Chains" was a personal statement. The song told the story of my mother, and how my father treated her. My father ran a kind of entertainment agency in Portsmouth, where I grew up. Which meant she worked as a stripper. She worked nights, so she would leave the house, and my father would send a driver with her every time to watch her. Whenever she talked to another man, even if it was just removing her gloves, then at home my father would already be waiting for her. And beat her up. I had to learn to deal with that, deep in the night, because I heard what was happening between them. That experience plagued me for many, many years. During the recording of "The Seeds of Love" in London, I was undergoing psychotherapeutic treatment, primary therapy ...
... whose founder Arthur Janov became known with the treatment method also called "primal scream therapy" ...
... two to three times a week. Those were sessions that were cathartic for me. And it was during this time that "Woman In Chains" was written. And, sure, it's crazy that a song like that still has to be so relevant today. Mankind is currently taking three steps forward - and two steps back. Maybe in a hundred years we won't have to talk about songs like this anymore. Who knows.
And yet "Woman In Chains" ends on an optimistic note, just as the first four of the eight album tracks have a rather hopeful, uplifting sound. It's not until side two that the wars and death begin: "Standing On The Corner Of The Third World", "Swords And Knives", "The Year Of The Knife", "Famous Last Words".
That's a good point, but I don't think we consciously put the tracks in that kind of narrative order. There were definitely discussions about the track listing, so where which song should be. I was just so enamored with our work with Oleta Adams, our guest vocalist, that I wanted to open the record with the tracks sung with her, "Woman In Chains" and "Badman's Song." Those were two epic, epic works. I fought to have those two songs right up front. Sure, people asked, why don't you open an album called "The Seeds Of Love" with the single called "Sowing The Seeds Of Love"? Tears For Fears are known for pop songs, but we were always characterized by another side that was darker. I think especially of "Standing On The Corner Of The Third World". And our debut is not called "The Hurting" for nothing.
It was a courageous comeback: no album for four years, and on the very first two songs of the record you sing a duet with a soul singer that nobody knew, but against whom you had to try to hold your own. You would have thought Tears for Fears was now a trio.
I had heated conversations with Dave Bates, our A&R guy, in the foyer of our Manhattan studio where the record was mastered. It's crazy, but no joke: there even had to be a discussion for him about asking Whitney Houston to be the guest vocalist on "Woman in Chains"! Sure, that would have been a real big hit! Today I can laugh about it. But it's completely obvious that you couldn't have taken Oleta Adams out of the album again. She is the key to this work. She unlocked it.
Did the record company not trust the two white guys from England to harmonize with a soul singer?
They certainly didn't understand that we were serious about our collaboration with Oleta. We first heard her voice when we were on tour with "Songs from the Big Chair," singing in a hotel bar in Kansas. We then suggested to Dave that he fly to Kansas and see for himself how great a singer she was. World class. In 1986 he flew over, but he wasn't really convinced we were a good match. He was listening to indie bands like The Teadrop Explodes at the time. When I produced Oleta's solo album, Circle of One, he even turned over his A&R duties for her to a fellow A&R, Nick Angel, because he wasn't that into her music.
Marching into your studio were Phil Collins, Manu Katché, Pino Palladino and Jon Hassell, among others. Months and months went by. Everywhere you can read that "The Seeds of Love" cost a million British pounds. Is that true?
The figure is correct. I think it was the most expensive album of all time at the time. Even today, a million pounds is a lot of money in that context. For the time, it was an almost absurdly high amount for an album production. But Tears for Fears only owed the sum in part. An example: at the end of 1988 we went into the studio to mix "Sowing The Seeds of Love". The song was finished and we handed it over to the record company. Six months later: we were still mixing. Not recording, but mixing! But that wasn't up to us. It was the label. Yes, we spent the million - but we had to do it because the record company people were getting paranoid.
Why?
They thought the songs wouldn't reach the class of "Songs From The Big Chair". Well, six months later we had a new mix, and the famous Bob Clearmountain had also done one. But the mix he then found most suitable was the very early one from 1988. So we were moving in circles. The situation was not easy. It also stemmed from our uncertain behavior, because we were producing our music ourselves for the first time.
How did you go about it?
"Let's take this guitarist," "this one on top of that," "hey, this guitarist is in town right now!". Three to four people, each playing a different riff on the same song. We were like kids in a candy store. But: I'm still glad we went about it that way. You can hear every pound spent on the record.
"Sowing The Seeds of Love" did not make it to number one on the American Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. The spot was blocked by Janet Jackson with "Miss You Much." Was the complex song structure of different melody runs merging into each other, which American DJs then cut out for format radio, partly to blame?
It's a tricky business. To be number one in the U.S., you have to have both the most sales and the most airplay on the radio. We had the sales, but not the radio airplay. Janet Jackson, fair enough: she was a big star. But I also see a problem: If our song had been number one, the record company would have felt even more pressure to push for our album. Now we were number two, and our label took its foot off the gas. We could go on tour in peace. Curt, by the way, went to several record stores and never found the album once. That's the unfortunate politics of the music business: in 1985, we had a good connection with the label in America through our A&Rs. Four years later, there was new leadership over there, and they didn't want to work with Dave anymore, to support our album. We went platinum with "The Seeds of Love," but "Big Chair" sold five times as much. "Seeds" is considered a failure there. But in Europe, the album did so much better.
In "Sowing The Seeds Of Love," you attack your then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: "Politician Granny With Your High Ideals, Have You No Idea How The Majority Feels?" A year later, she was gone.
I couldn't really be happy about that. After all, she resigned instead of being voted out. They got rid of her. Another Tory took over, so you could feel cheated. That's how British politics works - that was a typical British regime change, maybe they'll do it similarly with our current Boris. They change their leaders in the middle so that they win the elections. So it can be said, "We've had our change now - why vote for change?". In 1997 Tony Blair came in, I thought that was great. But only the first few years. We all like to look back and say: What great prime ministers they were. But here in Great Britain, it's not so easy. Somehow each of them screwed up in his or her own way.
"Shout would be THE protest song for 2020"
Would the positive message of "Sowing The Seeds Of Love" still have a chance today?Looking ahead to this year, "Shout" would probably be the more relevant song. It would be the song for the countless protests of 2020. We're in a really bad mess. In America, in the UK. I can't remember a more horrible time since I've been alive.
You're currently in Denver, what's the mood like there?
I still live in the UK, my fiancée is from the US, so we're in Denver right now. We're not married yet. We want to get married soon, but so she had to leave England first after six months. And I can only spend half a year in the States with my visa, so we fly back and forth. I honestly try not to think about the current situation in the US at all. Because it would be depressing. Politics. And Corona - also in the UK. The threat of a second wave of COVID. It will take years to get rid of the disease. I hope we get rid of the political problem in America faster. The elections are in November, and I hope people make up their minds in a way that they want to go down a path to finally be able to fight the disease. Recover.
The still-president got cease and desist letter after cease and desist letter because no serious band wants him to play their songs during the election campaign. Apparently, he was smart enough to at least not play the song titled "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" ...
Haha, yeah!
By the way, what is striking about the Super Deluxe Edition of "The Seeds Of Love" is that there are many remixes to "Year Of The Knife". Why didn't you release that song as a single?
"Sowing The Seeds Of Love" was an obvious out. And we really thought "Woman In Chains" was going to be a hit. It's not like we weren't trying to promote album sales via the singles. We had two number one placements in the U.S. on "Big Chair" as well as a number three. But such rankings are only relative as a degree for measuring success anyway. "Year Of The Knife" presented the biggest challenge as we searched for the best drum rhythm.
How did the collaboration with Steven Wilson, who has now remixed the record, come about?
Steven Wilson is a bit of a genius, to say the least. But not only did he create a new sound structure, which is stunning in itself. He also asked us and Steven [sic!] Bascombe, who co-produced at the time, what we would have liked to have different. So after all the years of living with "The Seeds of Love", the doubts that maybe we were putting too much reverb here and there, he has now fixed those things. The album just sounds so much better now. We've been very lucky lately anyway.
What do you mean?
There are a few artists who have recorded great cover versions of our songs or fabricated successful samples. Maybe that makes us even more present or successful than what we did in the 1980s. Lorde, Michael Andrews and Gary Jules, Drake, Kanye West ... today we talk about interpolation, expansion. They're expanding our songs. And we benefit from streaming. From their versions, links lead directly to our originals. Weezer covered "Everybody Wants To Rule The World," and we played live with them at Coachella.
What about new songs, a new album?
We've been working on it for six to seven years. In 2017, we finished an album, twelve songs. But the record company wanted to put out a "Greatest Hits" first. So we dropped two new tracks, "I Love You But I'm Lost" and "Stay." For the new tracks, we collaborated with some younger songwriters to create a "Modern Contemporary Record." In 2018, Curt and I dealt with the recordings again - and we didn't like some of them anymore. But: we're back in the studio. We're keeping half the songs we like - the ones that sound like us, that we're responsible for. Not the ones that sound like we're just struggling. Now we need a few more that sound like Tears for Fears. More heart, more emotion, more soul.
So it's still taking time?
Just what we've managed to do in the last two weeks is better than the finished work of 2017. Which doesn't mean that the previous experiments will remain unreleased. Maybe we'll release ten new songs, really new ones, and the rest of the old ones as bonus tracks. I keep my fingers crossed, for us, that a new album from Tears for Fears will be released in 2021.
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