Tears For Fears’ The Seeds Of Love Turns 30

Over thirty years on from its original release, Tears For Fears’ third long-player The Seeds Of Love has taken on mythical status for its scope, ambition, timeless musicality, and the fact that it took over four years to record.

For music fans and audiophiles the world over, the album continues to astound with its depth and sheer audacity, which is why three decades on it, has barely aged a day. As Roland Orzabal puts it, “Out of all our albums, I’d probably rank it highest. I think it surprised a lot of people, a lot of our peers as well, people who maybe we were being compared to in the mid-Eighties.” Curt Smith “The tracks I liked then, I still like now. ‘Woman in Chains,’ ‘Badman’s Song,’ ‘Sowing the Seeds of Love,’ and ‘Advice For The Young At Heart’ have all stuck around. We still play those live.”

The super deluxe box set consists of four CDs and one Blu-Ray, which fully tells the story of how this extraordinary album came to be. The box set includes 22 unreleased tracks from demo sessions, live jams, studio sessions along with a definitive set of b-sides, and rare mixes. Highlights include demos of “Advice For The Young At Heart” with Roland Orzabal singing lead vocal and “Rhythm of Life,” which didn’t make it onto The Seeds of Love and was later given to Oleta Adams for her Circle of One album. The Blu-ray also features a stunning 5.1 mix by Grammy-nominated artist Steven Wilson.

While the band was pleased with these sessions, there was still at least another year of further recording, overdubbing, editing, mixing, tweaking and discussion, before the final mix was finished in New York in the summer of 1989.

All of the efforts that went into the making of The Seeds Of Love certainly paid off as it is now hailed as a classic of the time, alongside albums such as Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden. The Seeds Of Love was released in the ’80’s, but it remains anything but an “80’s album.”

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