Nows and Forevers

The past week I’ve done something that I haven’t done in a long time: Listened to an album all the way through, the way the artists intended. Even when I lived in the world of 45s and 33 1/3s, and that was the first half of my life, I didn’t really do that. And mp3s and iTunes have saved me from that.

But I willlingly listened to Tears for Fears’ debut LP, “The Hurting,” released nearly 40 years ago. In fact, the whole album will be 40 years old in March. Some of the songs are older than that, Wikipedia tells me, being released between 1981 and 1983
“The Hurting” came out when I was in high school. It hit me at just the right time, a confluence of my musical and intellectual awakenings.
This is a different Tears for Fears from the band that would become huge by the end of 1984, with songs like “Everybody Wants To Rule the World” and “Shout.” This LP is darker, informed by childhood trauma and isolation, and overall more than a little depressing, all to a finely honed new wave synth.

In other words, it was 16-year-old me’s jam.

The songs connected with me. Looking back, I can see why I identified with them. In 1982, I had moved across the country to southern California with my mother and stepfather. Everyone else I knew and loved were 2,500 miles away. Southern California was as far away from my upbringing in Connecticut as you could be, as I would eventually learn anew when I moved back East a few years later.

Beyond that, I was emotionally fragile. My parents had gone through a yearslong separation and divorce, and fought over me constantly. I was sent into what would be my first round of therapy, and which highlighted how broken I was. My parents shared custody and they did fine, but a custody battle erupted anew when my stepfather’s job transferred him to California. I left Connecticut one cold but sunny day in January 1982, after I was taken out of school for the last time early. That afternoon I saw my father cry for the first time when I left. I hated California at first but gradually got used to it and began to like it, and had friends for the first time in a while.

This is a long way of saying that I could relate to a lot of what Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith wrote and sang on “The Hurting.”

My entry into Tears for Fears was “Change,” which I remember being in somewhat frequent rotation on MTV back then. Despite the refrain “You can change,” it’s more about it being all too late. I was too young to understand what all too late meant.

What really resonated for me was “Mad World.”

Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me

For someone who had gone to five middle schools and was already on his second high school by the middle of ninth grade, that lyric cut pretty close to the bone.

But there’s a lot going on in “The Hurting.” One song, “Suffer the Children,” provided a perspective that I had never considered, although one that would make sense at the time to someone I would grow close to in the far future. “Ideas as Opiates” and “Memories Fade” were life lessons. Memories may fade but the scars do linger. And who would know that I would live out “Pale Shelter” in my adult life?

“The Hurting” works across much of the continuum of my life.

But the album also did a lot more for me, intellectually and creatively. Here were two artists, particularly Roland Orzabal, who were speaking to isolation and trauma and feeling out of place — emotions and experiences that are not unknown to teenagers but were constant companions to this particular teenager in 1983.

Tears for Fears, unlike any other artist of the time, gave me some of the language to understand what I was feeling. I learned that I wasn’t alone, that others felt that way. It was a time when you didn’t talk about your feelings, not that much. The band, and the album, validated how I was feeling and drove me to create in my own way and to seek out further ways to understand. I started a journal that I continue to keep today. And I read like crazy, driven even by trying to understand the name of the band. I picked up a book by Arthur Janov at the library, thanks to finding out the background of the band name. (That was a lot harder back in 1983 than it is today.) And it led me to more books on psychology and then sociology, which I devoured quietly but with enthusiasm and continued to do so for years afterward.

Tears for Fears also led me down a creative path. I’m not a musician but I have wanted to be a writer my entire life and I guess I am, since I have been paid to write professionally, sometimes quite well, for the past 33 years. Art of all kinds inspires me, and Tears for Fears’ willingness to confront their demons, to borrow August Wilson’s phrase, helped my angels to sing. “The Hurting” broadened what I was willing to write about, and helped connect me with my feelings.

The years went by and Tears for Fears rocketed to stardom. I gradually stopped listening to their newer work and I didn’t always listen to “The Hurting.” But I saw they released a new album earlier this year and it was just as soulful and soul searching as their younger work. That led me to rediscover “The Hurting” and write about what it meant to be.

It meant a lot. I don’t know where I would have ended up without it.