Interacting with Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal of Tears for Fears is not a relaxing experience. The 63-year-olds have a dry, yet expectant energy about them that makes you feel like you should be ready with insightful commentary on pop culture and deep observations on their perfect pop music. Global chart-toppers whose songs defy time and place, Tears for Fears’ music is inarguably more prevalent now than it was in 1985 when their sophomore album, Songs From the Big Chair spent five weeks in the No. 1 position on the Billboard 200.
Almost 40 years later, in 2022, Tears for Fears entered the Top 10 once again with their exceptional album, The Tipping Point. The well-received record put the duo on the road for an extended period. Fans of all ages filled arenas to witness Smith and Orzabal—who are more on point now than ever before, as is their excellent band—and sing along to hit after hit.
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(Credit: Chapman Baehler)
This experience was captured at Graystone Quarry in Franklin, Tennessee, a venue literally carved out of a stone. That performance is being released as a live album, Songs For a Nervous Planet, and a concert film, Tears for Fears Live (A Tipping Point Film). A wholly live concert film is a first for the duo whose prior concert videos/films, In My Mind’s Eye (1984) and Going to California (1990), are a combination of live footage and re-recordings in the studio. Secret World, a live album released in 2006 was a promotional tool their French record company released, in which Smith and Orzabal had no say. Tears for Fears Live is premiering in 1,100 movie theaters across the world on October 24 and 26. Songs For a Nervous Planet, which releases on October 25, includes four brand-new songs.
Two of these songs—the early single, “The Girl That I Call Home” and “Emily Said”—signal a turnaround for Orzabal who put the grief and desperation of losing his wife of 36 years into The Tipping Point. Orzabal remarried four years ago, and drops his current wife Emily’s name in conversation often. He has relocated to Massachusetts, Emily’s home state, where he is speaking from a narrow hallway-like space that looks like it is squeezing him from the sides.
On the opposite end of the U.S., Smith speaks from his home in Los Angeles, where he has been a resident for many years. His backdrop is a wall of shelves choking with books stacked every which way, giving him the air of an intellectual—which no doubt he is. They both wear black-rimmed glasses and attentive, if serious, expressions. There is clearly yin yang here as they fill in each other’s responses when speaking to SPIN about their first official live releases, four decades into their career.
Songs For a Nervous Planet and Tears for Fears Live (A Tipping Point Film) do a great job of showing your songs’ staying power.
Roland Orzabal: Once we’d sewn songs from The Tipping Point into the set, we felt almost like grownups. We felt like we were no longer looking back. The whole thing was so much more enjoyable. And yet you have this strange combination of songs, like “The Tipping Point,” which borrows the rhythm from “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” going into “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” It’s a wonderful amalgam of the modern and the old. On top of that, we had these crazy visuals that Curt and I put together with a lady called Dilly Gent. We had decided to go with the circular backdrop which showed a lot of those videos, and all of a sudden, our show was so much more than it was before. Because it was so much more, we felt so much better about it.
Curt Smith: The idea to film it came before the idea of releasing it as a live record. The tour was so good. This is the best we’ve played, without question, as a band. Visually, it was so strong. The first instinct was, “We want to film it. We want people who can’t make it to shows to see this.” The band was so good at that point in time that recording and releasing a live album seemed like a no-brainer. What was interesting, we weren’t as relaxed during the Franklin show because we knew it was being filmed, so we don’t look quite as relaxed as we would have done in other shows. Because of that, we presumed maybe some of the recordings from the other shows were better. We listened back to them and this one was by far the best, because we were concentrating on playing and singing because we knew we were being filmed. 99.9% of what you hear on the live album is from that night.
1982. ( Steve Rapport/Getty Images)
Are the new songs on Songs For a Nervous Planet an indication of what future Tears for Fears material might sound like?
Roland: No! A lot of the songs on The Tipping Point were written around a very bad time. It was tough for me personally, not just to record The Tipping Point, but to listen to Curt sing, “Please Be Happy” was torturous, in a good way. But it was tough promoting it as well and talking about the past. For me, in many ways, The Tipping Point is so much like The Hurting. We wanted the new songs to have an element of hope. Not hope in a banal way but hope in a rebirth way. Life will go on as long as you stay alive. The new songs, we couldn’t have put them on The Tipping Point, because it would have been absolutely saturated with material. Each album has a shelf life, there’s no doubt about it, and they just would have gone by the wayside. It was great hanging on to some of them and coming up with new stuff. The early part of this year, we had this remarkable creative burst. For some reason, we felt semi-possessed, and it all came very quickly and very easily, and we had a lot of fun. The songs are, in general, quite positive.
Curt: Each time we make a record is really a capsule in time. The Tipping Point was of that time. Normally what record companies ask you to do is take some other tracks and throw them on the live album to promote the album with. We ended up doing four because, as Roland said, it was coming quite easily, and they did have a positive feel to them, and we felt they were too good to be called bonus tracks. Hence, the live album has the four new tracks first, and then the live album comes after. It’s not just a couple of tracks thrown in at the end, because we just thought they were too important to throw away like that. I refer to the album as an EP with 18 bonus live tracks.
(Credit: Chapman Baehler)
In an interview you did with SPIN for The Tipping Point, Roland, you said, “The biggest crime of all, I think, was us not really plumbing the depths of our souls, and plumbing the depths of our suffering, not writing about the human condition which was our strength in the beginning.” It is those very things that still resonate in songs you wrote 40 years ago. What motivated you to be able to “plumb” again?
Roland: You do it for other people. You do it so whatever you’ve been through, firstly, someone else will identify with and say, “Hey, that’s what I went through too,” so they’re no longer alone in their suffering. And you do it because you hope that it is a part of our evolution. You hope that it’s actually going to make a difference. This is why I’m happy to unburden myself, because I definitely know I’m not the only person that’s going through it or has been through it or is going to go through it. That’s all I hope for.
Curt: There’s also an aspect of therapy for oneself. You chose the word “unburden.” We use the medium of music to do it. That’s art therapy to a certain degree. For musicians, specifically for us putting it down in words and making it succinct seems to help us focus on what the issue is, as opposed to just being overawed by it and overwhelmed by it. It makes the viewpoint a lot narrower, then you can focus in on the problem, and hopefully it helps.
Roland: That is put far better than I ever could.
“Plumbing the depths of suffering” in writing has never helped me. If anything, it has aggravated my trauma.
Roland: Here’s the deal. Feeling is non-verbal. If you can manage to put it into words, well done. Nine times out of 10, you won’t be able to put it into words. We put it into music, because music will cut off the left side of the brain. The left side of the brain will always interfere with what you are feeling and what your overall intuition is, your overall sense is, because music comes at you on a totally different level. So what you need to do is, take some bloody music lessons.
Curt: It’s something to do with rhythm, you know. In a weird way, I find that even poetry, as opposed to prose, is better because it has some rhythm to it, because, as Roland says, it moves it to the other side of your brain. When something has a rhythm to it, it’s musical already. Poetry tends to be more musical than prose, and I find that far more therapeutic than writing down things. That’s just a session with my therapist, effectively.
Darker Waves Festival on November 18, 2023 in Huntington Beach, California. (Credit: Scott Dudelson/WireImage)
How has the popularity of your music on TikTok and the many covers and samples of your songs impacted your live show audiences?
Curt: Things have changed a lot as people are far more familiar with our early work. Prior to streaming being invented and everyone having access to everything, a lot of people outside of LA and New York and maybe Boston and a couple of other places didn’t really know songs from The Hurting. There were certain radio stations that did play us so we had audiences that have been familiar and following us since we started. Coming to LA was always a joy because of KROQ and New York it was WLIR and WBCN in Boston.
When we play live now, the audience is far different. It’s strange. We’re playing bigger venues than we ever did. We never played the Hollywood Bowl before. We’ve never sold out Madison Square Garden before and that was even at the height of our fame. These things are new to us, but it’s also wonderful to watch the audience. There is no age group. I’ve had an 8-year-old kid in front of me singing every lyric to every song, including The Tipping Point. When we did Bonnaroo [in 2015], we had a whole bunch of 18- to 25-year-olds singing every lyric to The Hurting, which was not big in America at all. But you realize it’s this cult college album that still resonates with college kids, understandably so, because we were that age. Our audience is far broader now. For all the problems we have with streaming services and the fact that we don’t get paid—I say streaming services, obviously, record companies are somewhat responsible as well, because they took a lot of money and didn’t give it to the artists—it’s done a lot for playing live for bigger bands, I would say it’s not really helping small bands, but our audience now is far wider than it’s ever been.
Did you ever imagine this is where you would be at this point in your life?
Roland: Honestly, I really don’t think we thought about it. We just wanted to get things right. We just wanted them to get to the point where both of us would look at each other and go, “Hey, that’s not bad at all.” The Hurting, for us personally, was such a difficult process. There were tears before bedtime. Before we even had success in terms of “Mad World” in 1982, we became immune to everything. Our skins had absolutely toughened. When it was told to us, “Hey, you’ve gone up this much in the chart,” and in those days, it was really important, because you would keep going higher and higher and higher, we were like, “So what?” We were thinking about the next thing and trying to get the album done. By the time The Hurting came out, we were professionals. We had thick skin, and we would take everything on the chin.
Curt: That also comes from caring about what you do. We had issues with our ex-manager. I’m sure you’ve read that we were put together with all these different writers before coming up with The Tipping Point. His whole idea of making us huge: “You should be playing these gigantic places, and I want to get you up to being a stadium band, and you could be this successful.” And I love him, but never once did he ask, “Would you like that?” My guess is, both of us would have gone, “Not necessarily, no.” We like our private lives. Would we like to still sell records and still make music? Absolutely. Whatever it takes for us to do that, great. But do we want to become hyper famous? Not really. There goes your private life. We have had the luxury of having a very long career so far—and long may it go on—and still being relatively anonymous, which is a joy.
Tears for Fears perform at BleauLive in the Fontainebleau Las Vegas on October 30, November 1 and 2.
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