After a long layoff, it’s time to unveil the reworked, remodeled, rebuilt Tears for Fears.
The two members of the pop-rock band began a nine-month tour of mid-level concert halls last month to sow the seeds of album sales for the group’s latest effort, “The Seeds of Love.” The road show includes a stop on Friday at William and Mary Hall in Williamsburg.
The band has changed since last it was on the road. Curt Smith, the quieter, moodier Tear, sounded a bit worried in a telephone interview from St. Louis last week. The other Tear is the more extroverted Roland Orzabal.
“We had to disappear for awhile after our last tour,” said Smith, talking about the duo’s road jaunt in 1985 in support of its platinum-selling LP, “Songs From the Big Chair.” “After all the hard work and the success obtained, we felt like bits of public property. That’s why we took a sabbatical.”
Smith, the group’s bassist who shares vocals with Orzabal, was a candid interview subject. He was low-key but laced his comments with the individuality and intelligence that defines this British group.
The band’s second LP cried out on Top 40 and rock radio stations in 1985. The hugely commercial album broke the group big in America at a time when other electronic-oriented pop bands such as INXS and Duran Duran had paved the way. Most of Tears for Fears’ song were smart dance-pop tunes that the duo had tinkered with heavily in the studio. Their lyrics were straight from modern psychology (“Shout, let it on out” is an example.)
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” with its Euro-disco bass beat and message of dominance, was the song hummed on everyones lip’s that year. Other tunes, such as the rock anthem “Shout” and the slow, romantic “Head Over Heels,” made headway.
That surge of success wasn’t enough, Smith said. They could have been content with going back in the studio with another producer and cooking up another batch of commercial, infectious pop. But no.
“We’re not big fans of four-minute pop songs,” Smith said. “We want some meat to them. If anything, we add too much to a song to make it interesting to us.”
The group tinkered in the studio. They brought in several record producers in 1987, then weren’t happy with the results. Eighteen months ago, Orzabal and Smith threw out the master tape and started the new LP from scratch. They ended up producing it themselves, with some help from producer David Bascombe. It took four years between albums.
Tears for Fears, in effect, reinvented themselves.
While on their last tour, Smith and Orzabal went to a hotel bar in Kansas City. They weren’t happy with how their live shows were turning out. Onstage, it was just the two of them with drum machines, electronic sequencers and synthesized effects.
“It was very boring and tough to reproduce,” Smith said. “The equipment didn’t allow us any freedom to be spontaneous and have a live feel. It didn’t always work.”
At that Kansas City bar, the duo heard soulful blues singer Oleta Adams. They were so impressed they signed Adams to sing on the new LP. She adds soul on songs such as “Woman in Chains” with her gutty vocal duets with the Tears.
The group also decided to experiment with the studio-altered sounds of the late 1960s. The result was a hit, “Sowing the Seeds of Love,” which is currently climbing the charts on rock radio stations. It’s straight from the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour” songbook, with its swell of harmonies and electronically distorted instrumentals. It’s also an optimistic song about love.
“We just wanted to echo the sentiments of that era,” Smith said. “The feel-good psychedelia of it attracted us.”
Other songs are gloomier, jazzier, bluesier. It’s a complete package that has critics no longer calling the band wimpy boys with synthesizers or the new Peter and Gordon, a short-lived group in the ’60s known for pop pablum. Now Tears for Fears are called studio artists and their songs compositions.
Smith and Orzabal met as schoolboys in Bath, England. They’ve always done it themselves. They tried playing with bands while growing up, but found their ideas didn’t mesh, Smith said. “We couldn’t work in a five-piece democracy,” he added.
A 10-piece band is on the current tour, complete with two sets of keyboards, two guitarists, a sax player, a drummer, another percussionist and Adams. It’s a brand new, live-sounding band for a more broad-based pop sound.
“When we first recorded, we went for big choruses, loud guitars, a sound that was very Americanized,” Smith said of the earlier days. “Now making an album becomes like a journey. We don’t want people to just sit there. We want them to pay attention.”
* Tears for Fears and Deborah Harry will perform at 8 p.m. Friday at William and Mary Hall at The College of William and Mary. Tickets, $16.50, available at box office and Ticketron outlets. To charge, call 1-800-543-3041.
