[link:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/arts/music/tears-for-fears-heritage-acts-new-albums.html?referringSource=articleShare|
What Happens When a ‘Heritage Act’ Wants More Than Playing the Hits?
Tears for Fears are returning with their first new album in 18 years. The group is one of a number of veteran bands releasing fresh music after lengthy pauses.
Feb. 25, 2022
When Tears for Fears released their album “Everybody Loves a Happy Ending” in 2004, the English pop duo’s future, or lack thereof, seemed clear.
“I thought that was the last hurrah,” the singer-guitarist Roland Orzabal said on a recent video call from a house he owns in Los Angeles. “I thought it was a beautiful way of putting a full-stop at the end of the sentence.”
Tears for Fears had experienced a remarkably successful run in the 1980s, highlighted by worldwide hits including “Shout,” “Head Over Heels,” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and “Sowing the Seeds of Love.” The group had already endured a nasty breakup in the early ’90s, after which Orzabal carried on under the Tears for Fears banner while his erstwhile bandmate, the singer-guitarist Curt Smith, made solo albums, both to diminished returns, before they patched up their differences.
But in the music industry, there’s rarely a full-stop at the end of the sentence. While pop music is often a measure of the current moment, it has always been borne back ceaselessly into the past. Bands rarely break up; they go on hiatus. A successful career can outlive the performer that once powered it. Nothing, not even death, can stop the rumbling engine of commerce. Minting new hits and new stars is a gamble, but the past is the closest the music industry has to a sure thing.
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