The Seeds of Love remains a not-great album, but Orzabal finding the Little Feat in Songs from the Big Chair’s bombast has a seductive pull.
UMe’s fulsome box set, packed with jam sessions, discarded mixes, okay B-sides, and a remaster of the original, hopes to find a new one. But The Seeds of Love had trouble keeping its audience.
2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October, and, for the sake of Fontana/Mercury’s promo department, it better have. “ Sowing the Seeds of Love” peaked at No. Released in 1989 to cautious reviews, The Seeds of Love dropped at a time when formerly obscure acts like The Cure and Depeche Mode were earning Top 10 singles. By this time even Phil Collins and fretless bass wonder Pino Palladino had been enlisted alongside Adams. What became The Seeds of Love resulted from hundreds of hours of peripatetic experimentation, and, when the sessions stretched almost four years, probably just seemed pathetic to their dismayed label. A couple years later, deep into recording their third album, he contacted Adams with a request: would she join their sessions? Relaxing in a Kansas City hotel bar while promoting 1985’s quintuple-platinum Songs from the Big Chair, singer-guitarist-songwriter Roland Orzabal and singer-bassist Curt Smith were entranced by Oleta Adams, the Seattle-born R&B singer at the piano. To transform from a bedsit synth-pop outfit with a thing for prim diction to a global phenomenon projecting miserabilist pensées at arena scale must have ground Tears for Fears into a fine powder.