Label: Concord Records – 00888072408890
Format:
Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Pink
Country: UK
Released: 25 Feb 2022
Genre: Rock
Style: Pop Rock
1. No Small Thing
2. Tipping Point
3. Long, Long, Long Time
4. Break The Man
5. My Demons
6. Rivers of Mercy
7. Please Be Happy
8. Master Plan
9. End of Night
10. Stay
Some forty years into one of music’s most impactful, sometimes tense and yet curiously enduring partnerships, Tears For Fears have finally arrived together at The Tipping Point – the group’s ambitious, accomplished and surprising first new studio album in nearly two decades.
Yes, somehow it has been 17 years since the beloved duo released Everybody Loves a Happy Ending in 2004. Yet Tears For Fears has hardly been absent from the road, from our airwaves or from our hearts and minds here in the 21st Century. To the surprise of many – very much including themselves – they have actually become late-blooming road warriors playing arenas, stadiums and festivals in winning form with a new and improved band. Their recordings have been sampled by everyone from The Weeknd to David Guetta to Kanye West and covered by artists ranging from Lorde to Adam Lambert to Disturbed. The timeless, widescreen songs of Tears For Fears have also appeared in many films including Donnie Darko and Straight Outta Compton to name just a few, and the group now find themselves frequently name-checked by numerous younger bands as a classic influence.
And now, at very long last, Tears For Fears find themselves back in peak form at The Tipping Point, an inspired song cycle that speaks powerfully and artfully to our present tense here in 2021. This is an album that vividly recalls the depth and emotional force of the group’s earliest triumphs. Imagine a far more outward-looking take on TFF’s famously introspective 1983 debut album The Hurting set in an even more mad world, or 1985’s Songs From The Big Chair bravely confronting even bigger issues in our increasingly unruly world. Or even 1989’s The Seeds Of Love that sows a mix of love and other emotions.
So how exactly did Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith – the two childhood friends from Bath, England, at the heart of this global success story -- take so long to make this musical journey from their Happy Ending to The Tipping Point? To hear them both tell it now, The Tipping Point took a rather long, bumpy and sometimes painful path to get to a much better and far more intriguing place.
“Before everything went so right with this album, everything first had to go wrong,” explains Roland Orzabal with a wry smile. “It took years, but something happens when we put our heads together. We’ve got this balance -- this push-me-pull-you, brake-accelerator-accelerator-brake thing – and it works really well.”
“I concur with my esteemed colleague,” adds Curt Smith. “If that balance doesn’t work on a Tears For Fears album, the whole thing just doesn’t work. To put it in simple terms, a Tears For Fears record -- and what people perceive to be the sound of Tears For Fears – is the stuff we can both agree on.”
“Which is why we don’t make records very often!” Orzabal adds with a laugh.
Yet before all the good laughs and this great new album, there was no shortage of confusion, doubt and even an ultimately misguided attempt at playing the game.
As Orzabal explains it, Tears For Fears’ previous management seemed “dedicated to the idea of not making a new album.”
“And if it had to be done,” Smith adds, “it had to be written almost by committee with some of today’s hit songwriters.”
And though Tears For Fears has sold more than 30 million albums around the world, the pair decided to give this approach a shot. But before long, this reluctant attempt at compromise failed.
As Orzabal explains, “Eventually, that pressure and tension divided us -- not just from our management, but from one another too.” A professional tipping point had been reached. Yet when they eventually met up with new management, Orzabal and Smith played them, what Orzabal describes as “the five tracks we could both agree on, and they raved over them. So suddenly, for the first time in a long time we felt like we had someone in our corner who understood what we were trying to do. We felt like we had somebody on our side. To be in that position was a big breath of fresh air for us after dealing with being pushed in various directions not only by our past management, but also a record company we were signed to. It was the first time in a long time that we decided - we have to do this.”
Having experienced the death of his first wife Caroline in 2017, and his own serious health scare in 2018, not to mention a Global Pandemic, Orzabal explains that he has gained far greater perspective about Smith’s significant place in his life. “I can be quite honest about this because my late wife and Curt and I used to hang out when we were 14, 13, in Snow Hill flats in Bath,” Orzabal says. “Obviously, the older you get the more people you lose. And then you kind of think, `Hang on, I’ve known him all my life, almost.’ So when I had my medical emergencies in 2018, the first person I thought about ringing was Curt. I was thinking, 'Am I going to get through this?’ Get Curt on the phone! `You can have my guitars. You can have my clothes!’”
“You can keep your clothes,” Smith responds with a warm smile.
“I can say this,” Orzabal responds. “Curt may have some difficulty saying this.”
“No, I have no difficulty saying it at all,” Smith adds. “The thing is when you’ve known each other as long as we have, and have worked together as long as we have, there’s a bond there that becomes familial. So it’s different from a friendship. And it’s different from a marriage. It’s literally like that’s your brother. They may annoy the crap out of you every once in a while. But they’re still family. It’s the kind of bond that you can’t really break. It can fall apart at times. You separate for periods -- which I also think is healthy, really. I’ve walked away. But in the end, we always seem to find each other again.”
The Tipping Point is the bold, beautiful and powerful sound of Tears For Fears finding themselves together all over again.
“THE TIPPING POINT”
TRACK-BY TRACK WITH ROLAND ORZABAL & CURT SMITH
NO SMALL THING
ROLAND: When we first started this record, we did that thing called “speed dating” where you get together with a lot of writers and producers. And there’s no real sense of “Well, what do you want to say?” It’s more often like they’re saying, “Well, you’ve had a hit before and it sounded like this . . .
CURT: “So let’s try to do another one of those.”
ROLAND: “Yes, let’s do something similar to evoke your heyday.” Then I was sitting around with Curt strumming on acoustic guitars, and I stumbled on something which sounded completely the reverse, the opposite. It sounded organic. It evoked, I think, a little bit of Bob Dylan, but toward the end, you are hearing Led Zepplin’ish drums and then total chaos. And it was like, this is us. This is who we are. And it was so refreshing, and liberating, literally. Like the song says. “Freedom is no small thing.” And finally we can say what we want to say.
CURT: This could have been something from a Seventies or Sixties acoustic folk album at the start. The fact that we felt confident enough to go from there to the end of the song to where it’s just absolute mayhem speaks to that sense of freedom -- and that’s our comfort zone, weirdly.
THE TIPPING POINT
ROLAND: Our guitarist, co-writer and co producer Charlton Pettus sent through this very strange backing track in all manner of time signatures. I think Charlton was a little pissed off that we were working with all of these songwriters when he’s good at that kind of stuff. So he did that thing everyone does of thinking, “I’ll have a little shuffle like `Everybody Wants To Rule The World,’ and a little motif like `Head Over Heels,’” But of course, “The Tipping Point” is nothing like that. This coincided with a specific time in my life when my first wife wasn’t very well. I was essentially watching her die. That’s where the lyrics come from. It’s an image of a hospital room where you are just looking at someone and waiting for the point when they are more dead than alive. That’s the tipping point, and it’s almost like part of you is willing to cross that threshold because you are in that purgatory while they’re in purgatory.
LONG, LONG, LONG TIME
CURT: There’s just something uniquely bizarre about this song. Because It’s very different to anything I’ve ever heard – it’s a bunch of parts that really shouldn’t work together but somehow do, down to the time signature changes from verse to chorus. It’s a song that was searching for direction, and sort of found its own, especially once Carina Round, who sings with us on tour came in, and joined on the chorus.
ROLAND: I always felt that when I heard the lyric about something taking “a long, long, long time” that Curt was moaning and blaming me. Of course, it’s true.
CURT: Well, it’s not quite true. It’s really about getting tired of treading water and being ready to move forward. That could have been about a personal relationship -- like with Roland, but also it felt politically and socially -- something out there needed to be pushed against.
BREAK THE MAN
CURT: “Break The Man” started with Charlton Pettus, and it’s about a strong female -- which is obvious -- but it’s really about breaking the patriarchy. I feel that a lot of the problems we’ve been having as a country and even worldwide to a certain degree came from male dominance. It’s a song about a woman who is strong enough to break the man. For me, that would be an answer to a lot of the problems in the world – a better male-female balance. Just like in our musical partnership, it comes down to that word “balance.” If we could find more of that sense of balance between men and women, we would have more harmony (not to sound like an old hippie).
Tears For Fears has long seemed rather evolved on this subject,, since at least “Woman In Chains.”
ROLAND: One tries not to gloat.
CURT: And yet somehow one does.
ROLAND: We’re very proud of “Woman In Chains.” We got so much stick from other artists – our peers. I won’t mention names . . . okay, Pet Shop Boys. And Spandau Ballet.
CURT: We’ve been put down for it, but I am not convinced there is really anything wrong with being sensitive. Having been called that a lot over the years, eventually you get to a certain age, and the real response to that should be, “Thank you. Thank you for calling me sensitive.”
MY DEMONS
ROLAND: We did a lot of work in the early days of this album with Sacha Skarbek, and his programmer Florian Reutter from Germany. They presented us with a backing track and we just went, “Whoa.” Then we came up with some crazy lyrics about surveillance and all kinds of stuff. Yes, “My Demons don’t get out that much '' might be a little throwaway as a lyric, but this song is one hell of a noise, and we’re very proud because the synthesizers are SO aggressive here. Like us, “My Demons'' rocks in its own way.
RIVERS OF MERCY
ROLAND: My new wife is acutely aware of the struggles we had early on making the record and working with all sorts of people. She scratched her head one day and said, “Why don’t you write your songs with your own band? Because they’re amazing.” I said, “Well, not a bad idea.” We have a keyboard player named Doug Petty who is extremely talented. Doug got together with Charlton and did a backing track that was very slow and beautiful. I took it away at the beginning of the Pandemic and during the riots, we had an incredible piece of music that evoked peace and also images of the sea or a river. And it felt strange because during Lockdown #1, I was in the West Country of England, and it was beautiful. Then you turn on the TV or your computer and there is absolute chaos. The narrator in “Rivers Of Mercy” is a person almost desperate to go back to a time when this chaos isn’t happening. This song has that idea of redemption through the river, like in “Take Me To The River” -- that notion of redemption or baptism.
To my ears, this is one of the most stunning songs the group has ever done.
ROLAND: That’s probably my favorite song on the whole album.
CURT: Sometimes people question the running order of an album. To have “Rivers Of Mercy” -- this beautiful breath of serenity -- coming right after the intensity of “My Demons” makes it all the more powerful.
PLEASE BE HAPPY
ROLAND: “Please Be Happy” was written years ago early on in our process with Sacha Skarbek who is a joy to work with, a great piano player and a great guy. Of all the new people we wrote with back then, Sacha is the only one who became part of our team. Sacha was at the piano playing some chords and recording them on his iPhone. The actual piano you hear on the record is from his iPhone. “Please Be Happy” just hit me. On a very personal level, this song was inspired by watching someone you love sitting in a chair all day not doing anything, not moving, and when she does, she goes up the stairs with a glass of wine, and it crashes on the stairs. It’s a pretty heart-wrenching song.
MASTER PLAN
ROLAND: The narrator of “Master Plan” seems to be referring to a relationship, but the actual inspiration for the idea comes more from the relationship we had with our ex-manager. As the title suggests, it’s about when someone in your life has “the masterplan” – at least that’s their job. And the masterplan for our last manager was not to make any records because, “It’s a waste of time.” The song is a bit of a dig, honestly.
CURT: It’s all good for someone else to have a masterplan for your career. Not so good when it differs from yours. I think we gave too much credence to what other people were thinking, rather than leading our careers ourselves.
ROLAND: We stopped trusting ourselves. There are certain periods in a long career that are not going to work for you, so you might as well go home and do nothing. Then, the tide turns. All of a sudden, you’re floating back to shore at a very fast pace.
CURT: Half the battle is staying alive.
END OF NIGHT
ROLAND: “End Of Night” is one of the oldest songs here and one of those things that came from mucking about on my laptop -- which I do a lot. This is possibly the most catchy, up-tempo, direct song on the album, Does it mean anything? I’m not quite sure. It’s about Mistral – a wind that blows in the South of France. We’re talking about the refreshing wind of change.
CURT: Keep your wind to yourselves.
ROLAND: There’s not a lot to it, but there’s a joy to the song.
CURT: “End Of The Night” is not trying to be anything but a pretty simple pop song. And at this point in the record, that doesn’t bother me at all.
STAY
CURT: “Stay” was written during a time when I was considering leaving Tears For Fears again.
ROLAND: Surprise, surprise. It’s an annual event!
CURT: It’s a hard thing to walk away from something you’ve spent so many years doing, nurturing and building. It’s really a song about questioning yourself.
ROLAND: It’s expressing the conflict, isn’t it? And admitting there is one. Which is always a start!
With that, Roland and Curt both laugh joyfully, perhaps yet another tipping point averted.