For most of the past 15 years or so, Tears For Fears had done just fine on tours playing mainly the same songs from the four albums this duo of Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal had made together.
Eventually, though, the duo realized things were getting stale. It was time for an infusion of new songs. But there was just one problem with that.
“We weren’t ourselves 100 percent sure about what we wanted to do,” Smith said ahead of the pair serving as one of the headlining acts of the inaugural (and swiftly sold out) Darker Waves Festival at Huntington City Beach on Saturday, Nov. 18. Tears for Fears will be joined by New Order, The B-52’s, Echo & The Bunnymen, Devo, The Psychedelic Furs, Violent Femmes, She Wants Revenge, X, The English Beat, Crosses, T.S.O.L., Death in Vegas, Cold Cave and more for the single-day seaside event.
Navigating new territory
So Tears For Fears’ manager at the time, Gary Gersh, suggested pairing Smith and Orzabal with a variety of current pop songwriters to create an album of modern pop songs that would work with today’s music trends. The duo agreed to the plan.
“It was something different, so it wasn’t like we were taken kicking and screaming. We went along with it,” Smith said.
But along the way Smith grew uncomfortable with the collaborations and felt increasingly Tears For Fears had started down a wrong path.
“There were 20 tracks we did that just seemed like these attempts at a modern hit single,” Smith said. “Some were good. Some were, they just didn’t have the depth. And it didn’t have the arc that I require from an album, which tells a story. It has highs, it has lows. It’s more of a journey. The album we had certainly was not a journey.
“We got to a point when I said to Roland, ‘If this is the way you want to do it and if you’re comfortable with it, I think you should go and do it. I can take a step back,’” Smith recalled. “But then I think Roland went away and listened to all of it,…
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