An Absorbing Pop Memoir Written in the Stars

‘Welcome to Your Life: Love, Death & Tears For Fears’By Roland OrzabalDey Street Books, 304 pages“All around me are familiar faces / Worn-out faces, worn-out places / Bright and early for their daily races / Going nowhere, going nowhere.” The opening lines of Tears for Fears’ breakthrough hit “Mad World” remain strikingly resonant. If, instead of going nowhere, you have gone somewhere today — to a supermarket or pharmacy, say — I wouldn’t bet against your having heard a Tears for Fears song piped over the loudspeaker.Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith met in Bath, in southwest England, in the mid-1970s. Still going strong as a duo — as evidenced by their fine 2022 album “The Tipping Point” — they released only three albums during their 1980s pomp. But they sure left behind a prime selection of musical bangers from that decade: “Shout,” “Sowing the Seeds of Love,” “Change,” and, of course, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” The latter record — one of the few songs I can listen to ad nauseam without ever finding it remotely repetitive — still gets more than a million streams a day, according to Mr. Orzabal’s new book, “Welcome to Your Life,” which takes its title from that tune’s first line.If Tears for Fears were an unusual band — how many other acts have made primal therapy a guiding leitmotif? — then “Welcome to Your Life” is an unusual musician’s memoir: A poignant, brilliantly written, and deeply thoughtful creative odyssey. Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal of Tears for Fears pictured in 1989. Universal MusicThe book has generated headlines for Mr. Orzabal’s account of the death of his first wife, Caroline, after a long illness involving alcohol-related dementia and cirrhosis, and of his subsequent marriage to Emily Rath. But scattered throughout the memoir are insights that elevate it above the genre’s standard rock-star anecdotage. Consider the occasion in the mid-1980s when Messrs. Orzabal and Smith — ardent disciples of the primal therapy pioneer Arthur Janov — finally meet their hero, only to discover that he wants their help with a musical he has written entitled “Primal Scream.” The effect of their encounter with Janov, Mr. Orzabal writes, was like “God asking to borrow a fiver.”It’s tempting to think that, as with primal therapy in the 1980s, Mr. Orzabal is keen to use “Welcome to Your Life” to convert his fans to astrology. The book is threaded with planetary perspective, yet this never dilutes its entertaining musical flavor. Oddly, the two very different strands cohere into a satisfying whole, rather, in fact, like watching Roland and Curt on stage.The breakup of Tears for Fears in 1990, Mr. Orzabal’s subsequent solo records released under the band’s name, and his reunion with Mr. Smith in the early aughts will be familiar to most readers. Yet perhaps because Mr. Orzabal has written the book himself, rather than relying on a ghostwriter, it is rich in fresh observations. Of the making of the 1985 song “Head Over Heels,” for instance, Mr. Orzabal writes: “We tried with a scalpel to deconstruct it, and then a sledgehammer to push it into a more complex form.” Mr. Orzabal is equally candid about the four years it took between the recording of their second album “Songs from the Big Chair” and 1989’s “The Seeds of Love.”As a devotee of Tears for Fears, ideally there would have been a lengthy account about the origins of the band’s 1990 singular dance track “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” or more on Mancrab, Mr. Orzabal’s side project, that contributed a song, “Fish for Life,” for the 1986 film “The Karate Kid II.” But, as in his novel “Sex, Drugs & Opera,” Mr. Orzabal deftly balances emotional truth with reflections on the creative process, thereby leaving little room for arcane trivia.One key reason Tears for Fears have endured is the remarkable range of subjects their songs span — from childhood pain in “Pale Shelter” to the imagined final day on Earth in “Famous Last Words.” Yet the central theme of this smart, tender, and rewarding book is that staying true to yourself and resolutely charting your own course, whatever adversity comes your way, can ultimately be of greatest benefit to others. A most welcome account of a fascinating life.

An Absorbing Pop Memoir Written in the Stars

An Absorbing Pop Memoir Written in the Stars

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