A Million Pounds to Sound Like a Jam
Tears for Fears' The Seeds of Love gets another deluxe reissue today. The band spent about fifteen times more making it than its predecessor, to get a looser sound.
The Seeds of Love is back out today, this time as a 2LP with a bonus disc of demos and B-sides, a 3CD set, a half-speed-mastered LP and new Steven Wilson mixes in stereo and Dolby Atmos, per Classic Pop. It's the album's second big reissue; the four-disc box came out in 2020.
Here's the number everybody quotes. Songs from the Big Chair, the one with “Shout” on it, reportedly cost about £70,000. The Seeds of Love reportedly cost about £1 million. Recording ran from late 1986 to July 1989. The first batch, with producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, got scrapped in early 1987. Then Chris Hughes came back, the conflicts came back with him, and after two failed attempts the band produced it themselves, per Wikipedia.
The money was spent chasing a feeling. Roland Orzabal wanted something more organic than the sequenced sound of the earlier records, so much of the album was recorded as jam sessions and then edited down. Which means the band spent two and a half years and a fortune building something that was supposed to sound like it had just happened.
Then there's Oleta Adams. Orzabal and Curt Smith had seen her playing piano and singing in a hotel lounge in Kansas City on their 1985 American tour, and two years later they flew her in. She sings on three tracks, including “Woman in Chains,” and the label gave her a solo deal of her own.
The single that carried it, “Sowing the Seeds of Love,” got to No. 2 in the US and No. 5 in the UK. Orzabal wrote it in June 1987, the week Margaret Thatcher won a third term, and aimed it at her. He also took a shot at Paul Weller. It sounds like a Beatles record on purpose, and the critics said so. Orzabal also said later that missing No. 1 in America gave his US label “an excuse to take their foot off the gas.” Think about that for a second. A £1 million record.
He nearly called the album Famous Last Words, saying it “may well turn out to be our last album.” It was, for a while. The duo split and Orzabal carried on under the name; they got back together and made Everybody Loves a Happy Ending in 2004. The label put out a single called “Famous Last Words” without the band involved. It peaked at No. 83 in the UK.
For the record, he was born Roland Jaime Orzábal de la Quintana. That's a very porteño amount of surname for a guy from Portsmouth, and Wikipedia says his father's family had Argentine and Basque roots.