The songs Tears for Fears wrote about splitting up: “About the ‘divorce'”
There’s something joyful about the cyclical nature of music. As one band or artist or scene gains prominence, it is already on a course for the dustbin of history. Well, that was certainly the idea fed to us as youngsters. But the truth is, it is actually a recycling bin. Songs may fall out of fashion, but eventually they will be, if they’re good enough, picked up by a new generation. Tears for Fears are one such band.
A ginormous entity for years, the band fell out of fashion during the macho-driven bravado of the late 1990s and 2000s. The band’s soft-spoken songs and uniquely sensitive delivery didn’t seem ot chime effectively with the listening public. But all good art will be given a second chance, and Tears for Fears got that chance and are once again being picked up by young listeners, largely because of their potent lyrics.
Few lyrical themes have been revisited more often than the breakup. From The Beatles to Taylor Swift, tales of lost love have always dominated the airwaves, with artists finding heartbreak and heartache to provide a limitless muse. While many pop artists channel romantic love, or the absence of it, into their music, for 1980s icons Tears for Fears, it was a different kind of break-up that would inspire their songwriting.
Rather than borrowing from their romantic misfortunes and mistakes to inspire hits, Tears for Fears were far more focused on the personal, the political, and, sometimes, the intersection between the two. “We don’t really write love songs,” Curt Smith once stated in an interview with Metro Silicon Valley, “They normally involve politics or personal politics, and by that I mean psychology, to some degree; relationships, to some degree.”
This preconception of politics often permeated Tears for Fears’ biggest hits. ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ charts the endless disagreements between humanity, declaring, “Turn your back on mother nature, everybody wants to rule the world.” Elsewhere, the duo focused on the personal politics and relationship between themselves, particularly following their break-up in the early 1990s.
After spending the 1980s finding chart success, the dawn of a new decade saw Tears for Fears’ unfortunate decline. Amidst increasing internal disagreements, Smith made the decision to leave the project in 1991. “What weren’t we at odds about?” he recalled, “I think musically we were starting to grow apart, and personally – absolutely, we were starting to grow apart as people.”
From there, his musical partner and childhood friend Roland Orzabal would release an album without him under the Tears for Fears name, titled Elemental. Much of the record was inspired by the break-up, as the guitarist recalled to The Washington Post. “A lot of the songs were written while I was in a sense going through the ‘divorce,’” he stated.
He suggested that ‘Fish Out of Water’ was “obviously” about his former bandmate, a song which suggests Smith had lost his sense of self, while ‘Break It Down Again’ also referred to the break-up “to some degree”. Rather than taking too much offence to Orzabal’s sonic digs at him, Smith found it “quite amusing”.
“I’d left the band, he was pissed off, and fair enough,” he surmised. Smith also added fuel to the fire with ‘Sun King’, which suggested that his bandmate was stuck in solitude and bitterness and stated, “Boy you looked so bad.” “The ‘Fish Out of Water’ thing was a little obtuse,” Smith suggested, “And my song was like, ‘Yeah, but you’re fat.’”
Eventually, the duo overcame their sonic feud and reunited, though those iconic diss tracks remain. Listen to ‘Fish Out of Water’ below.
