The Tears for Fears songs inspired by primal therapy
For any aspiring artist, inspiration sometimes can be the hardest thing to conjure up. Even though there may be an incentive to play music for a living, there are only so many times people can look at their personal experiences before they hit a wall in their creative process. There comes a point where artists need to knock that wall down, and the initial beginnings of Tears for Fears was about taking those walls apart.
Forming as a pop duo, the group wanted to make something focused on something primal rather than the superficiality of pop music. Although the band would utilise the same textures as the likes of Madonna had around the same time, their music had to take things somewhere else.
The band took their name from the primal scream therapist Arthur Janov to capture the feeling of intensity. Becoming popular in the early 1970s, Janov’s practices were considered unorthodox for the time, having patients with repressed emotions deal with them by reliving their most uncomfortable experiences in real-time, screaming out their pain to cast out all of the negative emotions.
Then again, Tears for Fears weren’t the only ones to find inspiration from primal scream therapy. One of Janov’s initial patients was John Lennon, who would get treated shortly after The Beatles’ breakup and channel most of his aggression back into his music on Plastic Ono Band. Whereas Lennon may have used the sessions as fuel to address his fragile mind, Tears for Fears were looking to break down the mechanics of the practice.
On the band’s debut album, The Hurting, songs like ‘Ideas as Opiates’ were informed by the massive sounds of primal scream therapy, taking the crux of what Janov had done and putting it into a pop context. When talking about the approach, Roland Orzabal would explain, “That’s the chapter from Janov, and it’s really a reference to people’s mindsets, the way that the ego can suppress so much nasty information about oneself – the gentle way that the mind can fool oneself into thinking everything is great”.
Although the band would place more references to Janov’s practices into songs like ‘Memories Fade’, it wasn’t until their sophomore effort that they wrote a glorified anthem to the practice. Kicking off Songs from the Big Chair, ‘Shout’ would become one of the purest expressions of primal scream therapy. Looking at the chorus alone, the duo are looking to break down the barriers of the traditional approach to emotions, preferring to shout and leave behind all that they can do without.
The emotion captured in the songs also managed to carry over into the next generation. In the world of hip-hop, Kanye West would use the basis of ‘Memories Fade’ as the sample for the song ‘Coldest Winter’, written as a loving tribute and a cry of anguish for the death of his mother. While the primal scream therapy approach may have its critics, it has been responsible for helping artists get back in touch with their creative selves.
