Mid-Week Music: Tears for Fears - "I Believe"
Another banner song from 1985! I’m pretty sure I didn’t listen deeply to this album until at least 1988, because I didn’t have a CD player until then, and somewhere I have my copy of this album as a CD in a jewel case without the little booklet. I must have picked it up used. We had a grad night party (basically an all-night party for high school graduates that’s supervised so no one goes out drinking) and I won a Fisher 5-CD player. The first CD I bought was a compilation by The Mission which I never really got into. The second one was a compilation of Tones on Tail which I still listen to regularly.
I digress of course.
Tears for Fears were everywhere in late ‘84 and through ‘85, and I don’t think they’ve left mainstream radio at any point. “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and “Head Over Heels” were huge and ubiquitous. They were obvious hits, and I think the latter two singles were written to be hits. “Shout” is a lot more strange, but it has that chorus that guarantees that everyone’s parents join along in the chorus unironically whenever it comes on.
But I digress.
“I Believe” was on the second side of the album, or half-way through the CD, and it comes in quietly with the whisper of a drum sound played backward followed by a simple progression on a grand piano and a slow, swinging drum beat. It’s a respite from the frenetic, urgent “Mothers Talk” that precedes it. It’s quiet and beautiful, with a soulful saxophone and unhurried rhythm.
The lyrics, which are supposedly inspired by Primal Therapy (which I know very little about) are burned into my memory from countless listens, but it’s only as a middle-aged adult that I’ve begun to unpack them.
I believe
That when the hurting
And the pain has gone
We will be strong
Oh yes, we will be strong…
I believe
That if you knew just
What these tears were for
They would just pour
Like every drop of rain
These declarations of belief are interspersed with declarations that “I believe it’s too late for anyone to believe” which is awfully dark for a song seemingly about redemption through catharsis. It’s difficult to get my head around that because I want so badly to believe that we can cry our way out of the bad shit.
I know for a lot of us it’s not too late to believe. For me it was an abstract belief, a ridiculously long-shot belief, that got me to focus on stopping drinking. For years I didn’t think I could do it, and I had to almost fool myself into thinking “of course I can do it this time” many, many times. And eventually I did. Maybe that’s the dark part of the song—a temporary resignation that it’s too late, we’re too far gone. Or is it a projection and it’s the protagonist who fears they’re too far gone and says it must be all of us who can’t come to believe?
This album, Songs from the Big Chair, and its predecessor, Tears for Fears's debut The Hurting, are deeply informed by trauma. There is an excellent BBC television documentary about the album that explores the relationships that Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, the main members of the band, had to trauma, and their discovery of Arthur Janov’s book The Primal Scream. They believed that singing their trauma out loud would be therapeutic. It was that lyrical depth combined with the synthesizers and big sounds of the early 80s that would create something that was both crowd-pleasing and very personal.
“He put in things that meant something to him, but he didn’t mean for it to have the same meaning for every individual. And this is the way he wrote.” Oleta James, who later joined the band on tour and in the studio, said this about Orzabal’s lyrics, and I think she’s spot on.
This wasn’t an obvious album for me to love as a teenager, as I would often reject popular music out-of-hand for not being alternative enough. But this album holds up like so few others musically and especially lyrically. Orzabal himself mentions (in the same documentary) that the lyrics he wrote at age 18 still have relevance to himself at 57.
Oleta James singing “I Believe” live with Tears for Fears
Documentary from BBC Four - Classic Albums - “Tears for Fears: Songs from the Big Chair”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000f8xc
Alternate site for the documentary
