Many bands that rose to prominence in the ‘80s have turned into oldies bands, tied to a moment in history and profiting from fans’ love for nostalgia. Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith of Tears for Fears haven’t fallen into the stagnant rut that has captured so many of their contemporaries. More than four decades after forming in Bath, England, in 1981, Tears for Fears is producing some of its best material.
Orzabal and Smith began their creative resurgence in 2022 with their first studio album in nearly 18 years, The Tipping Point, which reached No. 1 on Billboard‘s Top Album Sales and Top Alternative Albums charts. In October, the band continued its hot streak by releasing four new songs as part of a live album, Songs for a Nervous Planet.
“It’s because we care,” Smith tells Billboard‘s Behind the Setlist podcast when explaining the caliber of the band’s recent songwriting and recordings. “We don’t want to do bad work. We still have a desire to get better. I don’t think that’s ever going to leave us. We look at other artists and still wish we were that good. That will never leave us, because we’re never going to become that good, I don’t think. There’s always going to be someone that’s better than us, without question. So when you still have that desire, you’re going to continue to do good work because you are continuing to try and achieve something better than you’ve done before. And that’s what keeps us going.”
Songs for a Nervous Planet is the audio complement to a live concert film, Tears for Fears Live (A Tipping Point Film), that was given a brief release in theaters in October before being made available online. Recorded at the FirstBank Amphitheater — a former quarry that provides a spectacular backdrop — in Franklin, Tenn., the film captures the band performing at the top of its game. “Everyone that had come to see the show said it was amazing,” says Smith. “We get a limited view of it because we’re looking the other way. So we agreed to record it. And the reason being that we felt the band was the strongest they’d ever been — or we had ever been, should I say. And we were playing great. We sounded great. We were singing better than we ever had, playing better than we ever had. So it seemed like a good time to do it.”
The four new songs make Songs From a Nervous Planet, as Smith puts it, more like an EP with 18 live bonus tracks rather than a live album with a few new songs. “The record company wanted us to do a couple new tracks,” says Smith. “We felt that was kind of a way of saying, ‘Add some throwaway tracks.’”
Instead, they went into the studio and emerged with “four tracks that we felt really strongly about,” says Smith. The Songs for a Nervous Planet opener, “Say Goodbye to Mum and Dad,” perfectly captures the political and environmental tension of the day (“It’s no life, this island of fear/ When tomorrow comes, we’ll brave the wild frontier”). “The Girl That I Call Home” is a love song for Orzabal’s wife with a catchy melody (“Princes adore you/ They cower before you/ You’re the girl that I call home”). The stirring “Emily Said” is classic Tears for Fears: a complex song structure that doesn’t distract or become superfluous.
To Orzabal, the new songs “hold up brilliantly” to the band’s deep catalog of beloved songs that includes “Mad World” from the 1983 debut The Hurting and “Shout” from the U.S. chart-topping 1985 album Songs From the Big Chair. He’s particularly proud of “Astronaut,” a song that mixes disillusionment with a space travel theme (“I don’t belong here/ I got one eye on a different world”), which didn’t make the cut for The Tipping Point. “It didn’t quite fit, for whatever reason just didn’t feel right,” says Smith. “A lot of these things are not easy to articulate, because it’s just a feeling you have of what works, what doesn’t work.”
But “Astronaut” was “perfect” for Songs for a Nervous Planet, says Orzabal. “The whole imagery of the astronaut and the field of sunflowers [seen on the album cover], the continuity in the videos with the astronaut and his girlfriend, always featuring them, is superb.” In a couple decades, he adds, “Astronaut” will be “a huge hit for someone — not us, but for someone.”
Listen to the interview with Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith in the embedded Spotify player below, or listen at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeart, PodBean or Everand.