Chose this one today simply because I love the band, and this particular CD is comfort music. With full acknowledgement that Rush and Yes are considered the premiere prog rock bands, The Alan Parsons Project is my personal favorite. They are one of the few bands — any genre — whose entire discography is in my music library, and there isn’t a single bad album by them. My personal favorite off of this one is “In the Lap of the Gods,” an epic instrumental that is perfect for inclusion in a playlist for, as one of my best friends has stated, “killing fake people in video games to.” I keep hoping that Ghost someday decides to perform and record their own rendition of the song.
For a lot of very understandable reasons, most of the albums that we deem our all-time favorites are the ones from our teens and young adult years — at the time of life when the memories associated with the music we listen to are far more intense and intertwined. It doesn’t hurt that at the stage of our lives, nearly all the songs and albums we are listening to is new to our ears, regardless of how old that material is. Therefore, it’s no coincidence that by the time you reach your mid-to-late 30s, your taste in music starts to calcify and it seems to take more energy to find new music that ends up being as meaningful to you as what you listened to in your formative years.
Therefore, it was a surprise to me that The Tipping Point quickly became the album it did in my collection. It may very well be my favorite album of this century thus far. I fell in love with it almost immediately, and the play counts in my Apple Music library show I’ve listened to it a half dozen times in the nearly four years since purchasing the CD. More than that, it led to my doing a full deep dive into the Tears for Fears catalog. Before this, I never owned a copy of The Hurting (though my wife brought her CD of it into the marriage,) and while Songs From the Big Chair was one of the first I owned on vinyl and ranks amongst my favorite ‘80s albums, at the time of its release The Seeds of Love effectively ended any additional desire to seek out any of their other material. Now, our music library contains the band’s complete discography.
I now appreciate The Seeds of Love in a way I didn’t at the time of its release, see just how amazing a debut album The Hurting was, have songs I love from their reunion album, Everyone Loves a Happy Ending, and even found some gems on the two Tears for Fears albums that were really Roland Orzabal solo efforts with the Tears for Fears name slapped on them. Yet, Songs From the Big Chair, as great as that album is, doesn’t mean as much to me The Tipping Point, which was the right album at the right time in a way that none of their other albums were. The themes, subject matter, and the music itself all just resonated and connected with me in a way that hasn’t happened since Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising.
As a result, it’s not hyperbole to suggest that Tears For Fears currently might now be my favorite band. My listening stats from my Apple Music library for the last coupleyears irrefutably support that notion. As for favorites off of Tipping Point, there are a few that stand out on an album that was clearly crafted to be listened to as a unified whole, and that’s how it really should be experienced. Having said that, the opening track, “No Small Thing,” is the perfect introduction — a deeply retrospective, almost mellow song that builds in complexity and intensity without letting the music get away from the lyrics. It sets the tone for an album that I recall one reviewer stating could’ve been called The Healing.
Then there’s “Break the Man,” a song clearly born out and absolutely in support of the “Me Too” movement. A successor of sorts to “Woman in Chains,” Tears for Fears clearly demonstrate that they are absolutely down with taking down the patriarchy. But the real gem on this album is “My Demons.” Its dark, pulsing energy and rhythm combined with confrontational lyrics actually brings me a kind of manic joy. On an album that’s my most listened to in years, this one really stands out. It’s been on heavy rotation since the The Tipping Point was released — the play count in my library shows 160 — and I’m nowhere close to getting sick of it. In fact, I played it again while typing this paragraph.
At the risk of writing a full-blown review, it just needs mentioning how wonderful “The Tipping Point,” “Rivers of Mercy,” (which is perfectly placed as the track following “My Demons”) and “Please Be Happy” are.
If you told me in my teens that Tears for Fears would be the soundtrack of my middle-aged years, I almost would’ve given you a befuddled side-eye. Yet, this is where I am, and it feels absolutely right.
This CD is the first of many things in my music collection. It’s the first one I ever (as an adult) that on its release date I raced to the music shop to purchase it and immediately listen to it the moment I got home. It’s also the first one I have had signed by the members of the band. In addition, it’s the first one I ever had to replace due to it getting excessively scratched after years of rough handing.
This is the album that BNL was supporting during the New Year’s Eve 1996 show where I first encountered Paula Cole, and it really was the soundtrack to my first several months of living in NYC after moving up there in July 1996. I can still easily recall listening to this album on my Panasonic Shockman player when walking along the east side of Central Park in the evening while walking back to my apartment on Yorkville section of Manhattan from my job just off of Times Square. While “The Old Apartment” became the band’s first US hit, it wasn’t one of my favorite tracks at the time. Those were “Shoe Box,” “If I Should Fall,” “Break Your Heart,” and “Same Thing.” However, in the years since, my favorite track off the album, and one of my all-time favorite deep cuts by anyone, has become “Just a Toy” — a dark anthropomorphic dive into the mind the marionette Gepetto made just before Pinnochio and the jealousy he harbors against his younger brother.
The other interesting thing about this album is that was released as an Enhanced CD, meaning that it was encoded with Mac & PC software that allowed you to interact with additional bonus material when you put it in your computer. Unfortunately, the experience of using the Enhanced CD features is long gone as neither operating system allows you to play that software anymore. In fact, the Mac OS doesn’t even recognize the file system used on the CD, so it’s impossible to even check out the assorted sound and video files that the software used (this was something I was still able to do roughly 10-15 years ago.)
Opening acts are the crapshoot of going to concerts. Frequently, you’ve never previously heard of the opener, but the fact they are opening for the headlining act typically means that the headliners like them enough to believe that more people should know about them. I’ve gone to enough concerts over the years to absolutely forget a significant percentage of the ones I’ve seen. Others I remember because they were either awful (to my ears) or in the case of one particular band, they were so aggressively boring that I actually feel asleep in my seat during their set. There were a couple who were the reason I actually went to the concert — 4 Non Blondes and Echobelly — and then there was Paula Cole, who utterly blew me away and inspired me to get their most recent album at the next opportunity.
She was actually one of two opening acts on the evening that Barenaked Ladies performed a show at the former Roseland Ballroom in NYC on New Year’s Eve, 1996. Cannot tell you who the other one was, but Cole left a lasting impression. I don’t recall anything about the success of This Fire or any of its singles at that moment in time, but the energy and raw emotion she displayed that evening made you pay attention. Over thirty years later, I don’t recall any of the rest of her setlist, but there’s no way that “Throwing Stones” — my personal favorite of the This Fire album — Cole didn’t play it that night. The memory of her absolutely pounding the final chords of the song out of the piano combined with the way she almost screamed the final lyrics is just too firmly planted in my memory for it not to have happened. That song alone would’ve made me want to get ahold of it for my music library, but the rest of her performance left no doubt that buying the album was the prudent choice.
Oh, BNL was also spectacular that night. It was my second time seeing them live, and thanks to the concert, it was the closest I have ever been to Times Square when the ball dropped (the Roseland was approximately 10 blocks away.)
(This is a series I originally started on Facebook several weeks ago. This is a revised cross-post. Starting tomorrow I will be posting these here.)
I recently had a random recollection that this was the first album I ever owned (on cassette.) It really is mind-boggling how many hits Huey Lewis and The News had in the ’80s. Before listening to it, my recollection was that they made exceptionally crafted middle-of-the-road pop/rock that was absolutely recognizable as a product of its era, but was otherwise not particularly special. It’s nice background music, but without this little project I’ve embarked upon, I don’t know if I otherwise would’ve listened to this album in any format. However, after listening to Sports in full, I decided I might have been a little harsh with this assessment. A couple of the songs actually held up rather nicely: “If This Is It” and the lesser hit, “Walking on a Thin Line.”
Side note: Hootie and The Blowfish are absolutely the ’90s version of Huey Lewis and The News, only with significantly fewer hits. How well would we remember them if not for the one Friends episode with the five steaks and an eggplant?
The Talking Moose 