Songs For A Nervous Planet

Nearly 40 years after Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith first became global and groundbreaking superstars with Tears For Fears’ iconic second album, 1985’s Songs From The Big Chair, the duo continues to speak powerfully to the times with new excellent Songs – Songs For A Nervous Planet. This thrilling new release kicks off with four varied, yet uniformly impressive new studio songs, followed by the inspired and first-ever official live album from Tears for Fears that was recorded onstage at the FirstBank Amphitheater at Graystone Quarry in Franklin, Tennessee on July 11, 2023. Everybody can hear Songs For A Nervous Planet – and see Tears For Fears Live: A Tipping Point Film, a full-concert movie that was filmed at the same show when they release globally at the end of October. Taken all together, these new impressive releases from Tears For Fears artfully spotlight the enduring power of the duo and their excellent touring backing band performing at the continuing creative heights of their 21^st century glory.

“We’ve never released an official live album, so you could say this is an album forty years in the making,” says Roland Orzabal.

Asked about Tears For Fears’ creative mission for Songs For A Nervous Planet, Curt Smith explains, “I'm not sure there was a mission as such. We decided to film the live show last year. I think a lot of people don't know that we are a good live band, actually. They see a duo, and they think it's going to be two people with a couple of keyboards and a bunch of backing tapes, and that'll be it. Over the years, we've vastly improved since our sort of heydays back in the Eighties. We are so much better now, so we wanted to put that down on tape and on record effectively.”

Generations of Tears For Fears fans around the world can relax and indeed celebrate because the four new and previously unreleased studio recordings prominently featured on Songs For A Nervous Planet artfully and vividly demonstrate that nearly three years on from the release of the duo’s previous studio album, 2022’s acclaimed The Tipping Point, Tears For Fears clearly still have more exciting new musical points they want to make. The group has also never sounded better as they revisit and re-energize their impressive legacy of classics that continue to stand the test of time in powerful and often surprising ways in this exciting new context with their excellent touring live band.

And so it is that at a time when many of their contemporaries are busy looking back or saying farewell to past eras, Tears For Fears continue to looking forward, and are excited to bring all the energy of Songs For A Nervous Planet alive onstage, starting with three exclusive shows at BleuLive Theater inside Fontainebleau Las Vegas on October 30, November 1 and November 2 that will demonstrate that there’s still tremendous life for Tears For Fears going forward after the creative heights of The Tipping Point album and tour which included stateside performances at Madison Square Garden in New York and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.

“It's an absolute joy when we go out and play live now to be able to pick from that entire catalog,” says Roland Orzabal. “And when we made The Tipping Point, we were seriously updating what we were doing, and we knew it would translate live.” And now, as Tears For Fears look forward to getting the band back together for their upcoming shows in Las Vegas, Orzabal explains, “I'm just looking forward to playing regardless of the fact that we have new tracks and a new album. But I'm also very much looking forward to hearing what these new tracks sound like live because I've got a good feeling about them.”

Tears For Fears first formed in Bath, England in 1981. The duo’s influential 1983 debut The Hurting established them as an important new group and yielded such enduring anthems as “Mad World,” “Pale Shelter” and “Change,” all of which appear in impressive form on the new live releases, as does a compelling and dramatic re-imagining of that album’s “Suffer The Children.”  1985’s Songs From The Big Chair became a watershed moment for the group and for the music world generally, going quintuple-platinum and reaching #1 on the Billboard 200 album chart. Strong versions of that album's “Shout,” the BRIT Award-winning “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” and the most effusive version yet of “Head Over Heels" ever all are effectively featured on Songs For A Nervous Planet. As Roland explains, “I think `Head Over Heels’ is a good example of why we wanted to put this live album out. Initially, when we did the song, I wasn't sure about it. Now I absolutely love it, but live, it's a monster. And the response from the audience is remarkable.”

In 1989, Tears for Fears released The Seeds Of Love – which would be Orzabal and Smith’s last collaborative album for 15 years. That album is represented on Songs For A Nervous Planet by their fabulous smash “Sowing The Seeds Of Love,” “Woman In Chains” and “Badman’s Song.”  Meanwhile, The Nineties era when Orzabal continued to record as Tears For Fears without Smith is represented on Songs For A Nervous Planet by “Break It Down Again,” a gem from 1993’s Elemental album that was inspired by the process of rebuilding Tears For Fears following the duo’s split.

A funny and beautiful thing happened for Tears For Fears in the Nineties and early 2000s – the duo became a much sampled and soundtracked influence on three generations of artists and fans. For just a few of many prominent examples, The Weeknd infused “Pale Shelter” into “Secrets” on his album Starboy, David Guetta sampled “Change” for his “Always,” and Drake utilized “Ideas as Opiates” as the foundations for his “Lust for Life.”  Gary Jules and Adam Lambert, among others, cut popular versions of “Mad World” that made the song bigger than ever and Lorde recorded her haunting take on “Everybody Wants To Rule the World” for The Hunger Games – Catching Fire. Indeed, as a force in music, Tears For Fears continue to fire and become even more respected and relevant decade after decade. In 2021, they were honored at the Ivor Novello Awards with the Outstanding Song Collection Award for their influential body of work.

One major and perhaps surprising highlight of Songs For A Nervous Planet is an anthemic version of “Secret World” from Tears for Fears’ uplifting 2004 reunion album Everybody Loves A Happy Ending. As Orzabal explains, “The sad thing about making more albums is you have to start getting rid of some of the older songs or some of the not-so-old songs in the setlist. And with Happy Ending, obviously when we were touring that album, we played a lot of it. But over the years, those songs – possibly because it's not so well known as an album – have been dropping out. But “Secret World” is a hard one to get rid of. I think maybe in retrospect we should have released that as the lead single.”

Impressively, it is 2022’s The Tipping Point that arguably serves as the strong thematic core of the duo’s exceptional new live set. That album’s title track, “No Small Thing,” “Long, Long, Long Time,” “Break The Man,” “My Demons” and the healing “Rivers Of Mercy” – all present in a set list that creates a powerfully familiar yet compelling fresh conversation between all eras of Tears For Fear’s impressive and very much ongoing creative journey.

As Tears for Fears prepare for their upcoming exclusive run of shows this fall at BleuLive Theater inside Fontainebleau Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Curt Smith says, “It should be great to see how the new songs are live, and to celebrate the fact that Songs For A Nervous Planet and the concert film are coming out. It seemed like the right idea just to do a few shows, and we haven't played live since last year, so we're kind of a little antsy to get back into playing again.”

Don’t get antsy, get Nervous -- get Songs For A Nervous Planet.