Picking up the pieces
After more than a decade apart, Orzabal and Smith find a way to work together to create new Tears for Fears CD

MELISSA RUGGIERI
MUSIC CRITIC
Richmond Times-Dispatch   
Sep 9, 2004


It isn't an exaggeration to say that Roland Orzabal changed his life for this new Tears for Fears album.

Sixteen months ago, he took his kids out of school in England, set up house in a rental property and got down to the business of finishing the first proper TFF album with partner Curt Smith (the one with the short hair) since 1989. The duo responsible for some of the'80s most sumptuous hits - ambitious, crafty works such as "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," "Head Over Heels," "Change," "Mother's Talk," "Shout" and "Sowing the Seeds of Love" - had disintegrated under the usual someone-isn't-having-fun-anymore terms. It was Smith's claims of exhaustion and a desire to move to America - New York, specifically - that ended the pairing in what Orzabal calls "a pretty ugly" manner.

"Curt and I had been working together since we were 14. We were in the last years of our 20s, that time when you just want to start doing something different," Orzabal said recently from Los Angeles.

Throughout the next decade, Orzabal released a handful of albums under the TFF name to minimal attention, while keeping in vague contact with Smith.

"We always had ongoing business commitments and friends in common, so every time Curt would come to England, he'd visit our friends and avoid me," Orzabal relates with a chuckle.

It was longtime friend Chris Hughes, who produced TFF's first two albums, who finally persuaded Orzabal to talk with Smith, who had remained in the music industry as a band manager and also initiated the group Mayfield in 1997. When Orzabal released his solo album, "Tomcats Screaming Outside," he heard an expected mantra from record-label suits sniffing a potentially profitable reunion: "Why can't you get Curt back in?"

Eventually, Orzabal and Smith started talking by phone. The most awkward obstacle? Hearing Smith's "mid-Atlantic accent," Orzabal says, noting that after his partner spent 16 years of living in America, he can understand how his Bath accent disappeared.

The duo agreed to try to stay in the same room and wound up writing "Ladybird," a song that made the final cut on "Everybody Loves a Happy Ending," the purposely titled return of Tears for Fears, in stores Tuesday.

The more they worked together, the bigger the choruses and melodies became. That was always the intent, says Orzabal, not to make some avant-garde experimental album but to give fans a new taste of a familiar sound.

What the duo fashioned is an album stocked with rich, soaring songs, such as the pure John Lennon title track, The-Beach-Boys-meet-The-La's first single, "Call Me Mellow," and the most typical TFF song, "Closest Thing to Heaven," which combines heavy piano and melancholy overtones that quickly segue into bright choruses and layered vocals.

Orzabal is proud of the finished product, which has been completed since early this year but became the victim of a record-label snafu. Originally, Arista Records was set to release "Everybody" in April. Then Arista honcho L.A. Reid left the label and a new search began.

"Arista would have put the album out with a reduced marketing budget to fulfill their end of the contract, or they told us we could go elsewhere," Orzabal said. The duo wound up at a new division of Universal Music, New Door Records, which made sense as Universal owns the group's catalog of material. With a decent promotional push behind the new album, single "Call Me Mellow" is gaining attention at Triple A (adult album alternative) radio formats nationwide and Orzabal and Smith are planning an October tour of small theaters with a five-piece band.

The timing of this TFF return might seem random in the United States, but in England, the duo has been the focus of a resurgence anyway, thanks to Gary Jules' recent cover of TFF's "Mad World," which became a huge hit in the United Kingdom.

Orzabal jokes that if he had merely "stayed at home in England in my lovely big house counting the royalties" from Jules' radio smash, he might not have been too concerned about the reception awaiting "Everybody." But now that his wife and 9- and 12-year-old kids have been uprooted to live in Los Angeles - where Smith now resides, too - his commitment is firm.

"It's been an uphill battle and a strange start-stop project," Orzabal says. "But we don't have expectations. We're just enjoying the new songs and on stage, we're cracking all of the gags and taking the mickey out of all of those'80s things. We have a healthy sense of humility."