Earlier entries of this series can be found here: http://www.acclaimedmusic.net/forums/vi ... ive#p45337
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“High time we made a stand/ And shook up the view of the common man”
95. Tears for Fears – Sowing the Seeds of Love
The facts:
Year: 1989.
Genre: Pop.
Country: United Kingdom.
Album: The Seeds of Love.
Acclaimed Music ranking: #3358.
Song ranking on Acclaimed Music in the artist’s discography: 4th.
Ranks higher than P.S.K. (What Does It Mean?) by Schooly D, but lower than The Stroll by The Diamonds.
Place in the Acclaimed Music Song Poll 2015: Unranked.
The people:
Written by Roland Orzabal & Curt Smith.
Produced by Roland Orzabal, Curt Smith & Dave Bascombe.
Lead vocals by Roland Orzabal.
Backing vocals by Roland Orzabal & Curt Smith.
Guitar by Roland Orzabal & Randy Jacobs.
Drums by Chris Hughes.
Percussion by Luís Jardim.
Bass by Curt Smith.
Keyboards by Roland Orzabal & Ian Stanley.
Hammond Organ by Ian Stanley.
Orchestra arranged by Richard Niles.
Note: These credits are not complete. There are far more background singers here (including a couple of women) and there are clearly trumpets and saxophones in the mix. The above credits are the one released by Tears for Fears on their album.
The opinion:
Last week I spoke about a song with the repeated phrase: “Hang the DJ”. This week I’ll talk about a song that quickly comes up with the line: “Dj is the man we love the most”. Ah, the variety of music I’m allowed to write about.
Like last week I’m again talking about a band from the UK that is mostly remembered for its eighties output. But whereas The Smiths were consciously rallying against the mainstream sounds of their age Tears for Fears were very much a part of that popular sound. Before 1989 the band had released only two albums, but both were major chart successes and featured a great amount of singles that were hits around the world. Obviously, these weren’t the people who were ever going to hang the DJ.
Still, all was not well. Roland Orzabal, who was “secretly” the main creative force of the duo, was disillusioned by the third election of Margaret Thatcher in 1987, whose policies he despised. Orzabal admitted to never having been particularly politically engaged, not even when writing their smash hit Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Whereas the first two albums were concerned with personal distress (the first was inspired by primal scream therapy, the second by psychotherapy), Orzabal now wanted to tell the tale of the people on the streets.
Sowing the Seeds of Love was the first he wrote with that in mind, although much of the album accompanying it has some sort of political edge. Most of the times, it doesn’t work for me. The lyrics on that album are frequently hackneyed, superficial and the singing is over-earnest. You can actually hear that Orzabal is new to this territory.
Nonetheless, he got it right on Sowing the Seeds of Love. Not particularly lyrically, although it has couple of nice turns of phrases (“Kick out the Style/ Bring back The Jam” is a reference to Paul Weller abandoning the political music of his former band for the more personal The Style Council; a reverse move from Tears for Fears). Mostly, it is surprisingly old-fashioned in its lines. I mean: “Sowing the seeds of love” is probably the most hippie line ever sung. It is just 20 years late. Fun fact: the title is even older. Orzabal heard a radio show about an English guy who collected old folk songs from around the country. One of them had Sowing the Seeds of Love as its title. It is not specified which song Orzabal exactly heard, but in the playlist you can find an old English folk song with the title that is presumably the one Orzabal referred to. It bears no resemblance to anything Tears of Fears ever did, though.
Despite a healthy dose of eighties production this is really a song that many flower power bands of the sixties could have considered, none more so perhaps than The Beatles. The enormous sound, complete with a horn section and chanting background singers might just have been taken straight from All You Need Is Love. Tears for Fears don’t hide their influences.
All this doesn’t actually hint at what makes this song so worth talking about, namely that it is absolutely bonkers. This decade wasn’t afraid of over-production, but Sowing the Seeds of Love seems almost to be made specifically to let everything else in the eighties seem minimalist by comparison. It’s a hard song to describe simply because there is so much of it (and that’s not even a reference to its length; it runs well over six minutes on the album and over five in single format). Orzabal seemed intent of adding every sound he could think of here and he might have succeeded.
The recording sessions were rather interesting. It took ages to make this album and also this song. If you look at the credits above it seems a mess and not just because names are clearly missing (you couldn’t fault anyone for not being able to keep track of all the musicians here, though). How many roles does Orzabal have? Not only is he lead vocalist, but even though he has what sounds like a complete choir backing him up he still felt the apparent need to provide backing vocals himself. During this period Orzabal became a driven perfectionist. Curt Smith on the other hand became increasingly frustrated by this and kept hands off for most of the recording of the album. Orzabal kept asking new musicians to come over to play parts of songs. For about a year and a half a long parade of people participated on the album. In the end Orzabal and co-producer Dave Bascombe put together the songs from elements of various recording sessions.
Basically, The Seeds of Love is sort of a sample album, with every sample being specifically recorded for Tears for Fears. That’s how this week’s song got it’s big sound. Apparently, less than 100 people contributed on it, but it sounds like we hear about 200 musicians. To capture everything that happens here in a review is madness. Even more mad is that the song works: no matter how many disparate moments there are and how many times the gears shift, it all sounds like a part. Heck, it is a real pop song; accessible and catchy. Tears for Fears are not categorized as progressive pop, which usually refers to musicians like Kate Bush or Björk, but at least here they made an honest-to goodness-progressive pop song.
I love its sheer lunacy. The way Orzabal almost raps the grotesque opening lyrics as if he is the coolest dog on the street gets things going nicely. Then there are slow trumpet bridges, glorious sax solos, power pop singalongs, rhythmic hand claps and shrill organ workouts, not necessarily in that order (or any order for that matter). David Marsh from The Guardian wrote a funny review about the song where he pinpointed the brilliance of the background singing in these words: “I love the random shouts, screams and whoops in the background (and the moment at around 2:43 when an opera singer apparently strays absent-mindedly into the wrong studio).” That opera singer appears earlier on Spotify, around 2:39, just so you know if you look for him (as you should).
Marsh also was so generous to provide a link tof a 2006 concert performance of this song in Belgium, with a full orchestra (100 person strong surely this time) and it is gloriously mad. I provided it here below and you really should look at it. My favourite element it is that the background singers have their own background singers. It really is that kind of song.
So yeah, this is a very silly song if you look at it from an objective standpoint, but luckily this is also the kind of track that makes objectivity impossible. It has sweep, grandeur and glory to last a lifetime. It may not work for me as a political song, but it works very much as something of the ultimate pop extravaganza. For everyone who in the future wants to make overproduced music: this is the bar that has been set. Good luck.
8/10
Further reading:
The David Marsh article on the song: https://www.theguardian.com/music/music ... seeds-love
Other versions:
First off, Tears for Fears themselves reworked the song somewhat on Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, a b-side to their single Advice for the Young at Heart. The lyrics of Sowing the Seeds of Love are repeated in its second half, now rapped by Biti Strauchn. It’s a pretty good in its own right.
This is by its very nature a hard song to cover. Most bands can’t afford the man power and don’t have the time to pull it off. Still, many tried. I can be brief though, because there is almost nothing of interest here. Many of the bands that tried to copy the big sound with less man power just end up making a dull, watered down version of the original. There are also a handful of singer/songwriter versions, but the lyrics here aren’t strong enough to make such an approach work. It is the complete abandon that makes the original so good. Without it, it becomes a silly song once again. Only the African styled cover by David Chevallier and David Linx is worth your time.
It should be said that there are a lot of karaoke versions of Spotify. My playlists here always used to include at least one karaoke version, but lately I seem to have gotten some songs that don’t have them. This time around we get more than ever. I guess it makes sense that this makes a good karaoke song. Many covers are karaoke versions themselves already, as a couple of them clearly sample the original music and add new vocals to them.
The playlist:
The song, performed live in Belgium in 2006:
