Music

You Need to Listen to This Song Right Now #44

Heavy Rotation — The Tipping Point, Tears for Fears (The Tipping Point, 2022)

Heavy Rotation was a music industry term for songs that, one way or another got incessant airplay. It referred to the large amount of rotations that a particular record was given on turntables at radio stations. Since, until the 1980s, this was the only way to get new music into the ears and brains of listeners, heavy rotation meant increased sales. These were good for record companies and artists alike.

Today, some of us still put records on at home and give them a spin. Most of us don’t. However, the term still applies, just in a different way. Streaming services like Spotify sell subscriptions to listeners and then pay artists based on listens. At least, that’s the way we think it works.

For me, heavy rotation means a song that is in my head for some reason. Maybe for a moment, maybe for a day, maybe for longer. It’s a song you come back to occasionally and still feels just as good.

This series of articles is dedicated to these songs.

Here, I aim to highlight a particular song by a particular band or singer. We should know a bit about the band, a bit about where the song fits into its history, and where the song fits into what was happening in music at that time. Then there’s the song itself. Who’s playing on it, what are the lyrics getting at and why is it so good? How does it still occupy sonic space in our lives?

I’ll (try to) keep it short. It shouldn’t take you any longer to read this than the song itself. To that end, I’ll put a Youtube clip of the original recording at the top of the article so you can listen as you read. Or not. And because a song is often much different live than in the recording studio, I’ll stick a live clip on at the end.

What song is in your head right now? Here’s the one that won’t leave mine today:

#44 — The Tipping Point, Tears for Fears (The Tipping Point, 2022)

I saw this morning that a Tears for Fears North American tour has been announced for the summer and will arrive in my city in July. As a lover of live music, I am truly spoiled for choice these days and will need to update the article I wrote about this just last week.

There are many places to begin with Tears for Fears. Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, as the two principles are individually called, came out of the blocks hot with their 1983 debut, “The Hurting.” “Change,” “Mad World,” and “Pale Shelter” are absolute classics of the genre. But what genre was it? Rock? Pop? New Wave? Dance? Progressive, even? Perhaps a bit of each.

But it was with “Songs from the Big Chair” where most of us will have come in, in the mid-80s. This is where it took off for them in North America. “Shout,” “Everybody Wants to Rule The World,” and “Head Over Heels” would be instantly recognizable to even peripheral fans. Large melodies, a big and progressive sound that was at the same time radio and video friendly, pushed them into the big time.

And then it stopped for a while, and it wasn’t until 1989 that “The Seeds of Love” was released. Certainly, the Beatle-esque title track provided hope for the better world that many thought was ahead, with its nostalgic references to their musical influences and bouncy rhythms. “Woman in Chains,” featuring the voice of Oleta Adams, was also a soaring masterpiece.

And then it stopped. Orzabal and Smith split up in acrimony, and the world moved on from their kind of music anyway. “Elemental” was essentially a solo effort from Orzabal as Tears for Fears in 1993, but their time had run its course. “Break it Down Again” was the poppy favourite for me with its lyrically intricate yet immensely singable chorus.

There was another album in 1995, and that could probably have been it, and they could have retired on the royalties from their output thus far and ridden off into the sunset. Perhaps they did for a while. Orzabal and Smith mended their fences in 2004 and put out another album that few people listened to, and that was it again.

For another seventeen years, in fact.

This brings us to their most recent album, a comeback of sorts in 2022, “The Tipping Point.” It would be difficult for me to say that this album comes close to “Songs from the Big Chair” since that work is their high water mark. But that could just be a function of the stage of life I was occupying when it first entered my unjaded ears. Who knows?

The title track is the centrepiece of the record. A soft rising keyboard brings the listener in, and the rhythm starts to take shape at 00:21, becoming more emphatic with echoing guitar chords as the song takes off at 00:59 with a trademark beat and piano chord progression. “You know that I can’t love you more” is the first vocal and instantly recognizable harmony from Smith and Orzabal at 1:03.

On first listening, one might wonder if the wording of that lyric is to say that “I’ve reached the limits of my love and I can’t do this anymore” and that a love is over, or if it means that “it would not be possible for me to give any more love to you because my feeling for you is just that gigantic.”

A little checking indicates that Orzabal wrote this song in response to the illness and then death of his wife, leading me to believe it’s probably the latter of the two. It forms the basis for a song about letting love detach oneself from the darkness of the times, both specific (his wife’s death) and general (the emergence of the world from the pandemic).

The question really surrounds the point between life and death at which things do indeed tip. Orzabal watched his wife slip into alcohol-related dementia and wondered aloud at the point at which she was alive but was no longer living and how to deal with it.

“Winter done, they’ll soon be gone

From this unforgiving place

To that vague and distant void

Where the sunlight splits the eye”

The descent was long, and the letting go was probably longer. “Who’s that ghost knocking on my door?” he asks, trying to understand everything. He repeats that it is impossible to give her any more love, not because he can’t, but because she already has it all from him.

“Life is cruel, life is tough

Life is crazy, then it all turns to dust

We let ’em out, we let ’em in

We’ll let ’em know when it’s the tipping point, the tipping point?”

Where is the moment at which he knows she’s gone? Is it the same moment that she realizes it? Or does he have to tell her himself? “Conversation is over and done / Will you let them out? / Will you let them in?”.

We will all have to do it at one point or another, but it will never be easy to answer the question of when and how do you let them go? How do you release someone?

The music is smooth and slickly produced, and the harmonies are soothing. A pulsating rhythm pushes the song along as though the listener is meant to head with them to a future destination, either imminent or still a long way off.

We hope.

Here they are, on a live for radio and TV performance in 2022.

If you have made it this far, it will occur to you that if this is #44 in this series, then there must be 43 previous ones. This is a correct assumption, and here I will link #43. At the bottom of it, you will find a link to #42, and at the bottom of that, you can — if you so choose — be taken to #41.

This ingenious system that I thought up all by myself continues all the way to #1.

I really do hope that you like what you have just read. If you want unlimited access to thousands of writers, consider a subscription to Medium. It will set you back $5 a month, and if you use the link below, then I get a slice of that. I’m going to buy this record. And now I have a record player.