Truth Telling

Personal Spiritual Views
on the frame of my music background

Before you think you’ve arrived at the wrong BLOG, I have decided to expand what I include here to some of the things I have been writing about spiritual things that are in step with my personal Music Business Background. I believe many people in the arts industries – movies, acting, writers – are going to begin to awaken to their need for more heart stability that can only be found in the Lord. They are just people.

An unexpected pivot toward Tears for Fears
because I’m tired of just preaching to the choir

On September 14th I wrote on my Facebook page about how music was the major idol in my life when I returned to God in last months of 1983. Music became my life in my teens and by my 20’s I was building my life on the music business.

In the mid 1970’s I worked my way up from concert reviews to become the editor of a concert music industry trade magazine. At times I attended 4 concerts in one week. Even in the few years I did that job, it became a blur all the shows I saw and interviews I did: Billy Joel, Boston, Gino Vanelli, Cheap Trick, Styk, Al Jarreau, Genesis, Journey, Springsteen, Rush, Black Sabbath, The Ramones and even Parliament Funkadelic. Departing that job I loved because of a new boss who wanted favors I was not willing to give, I did promotions at the newly opened Dallas Agora showcasing up and coming artists like Pat Benatar and Dire Straits. Stories. I’ve got a few. I just rarely think on those things.

By 1983 my life was crashing on the rocks of life. That’s when the guy I lived with, a former drummer/lyricist of a 3-piece power rock band signed in 1971 to Capitol Records, was in bad shape due to a degenerative spine disease. It would be that guy, my husband of the last 43 years, Tony, who would drag me back to church in 1983. He was desperate for physical healing. We married within a couple of months before our first visit because I didn’t want church people giving me a hard time about shacking up. I did not yet know that it wasn’t church people I needed to please, it was God.

So we got married and experienced powerful personal touches from God straight off. Both of us, experienced healing and the power of the Holy Spirit sweeping through our bodies. One time sitting there in church Tony felt the Holy Spirit ‘whoosh’ through his body from left to right and at the exact same time I felt the Spirit ‘whoosh’ through my body from right to left. We were stunned and our reaction was to turn in the direction the Spirit had exited our bodies. Our heads jerked in that direction and we were looking at each other in utter shock.

This happened within weeks of starting to attend and neither of us had ever been exposed to anything like that before. These personal touches from God were a powerful witness to us that He is real and we were in the right place. As I wrote in earlier posts:
“I devoured the bible. Read it through 5 times the first year. I read it like I was drowning and it was the only thing that could save me. It was the only thing that saved me.”

“The other thing I did in that first year was to put down my idol of music. I turned the music off, quit listening and quit following what was happening in the business. I went cold turkey to break that idolatry off of my life.

I didn’t start listening to music again until the late 1990’s in another rough spiritual patch I went through because of bitterness and unforgiveness I had stored up in my heart. The music idolatry was gone though.”

Now I include this because many Christians are dead set against popular music. I’m not, as long as it is music appreciation and not idolatry, as it often is. I suspect many are pearl clutching over this article, but think what they will, it is not for their sake that I write.

That’s the set up. It is the background to all the rest of what I write here about Tears for Fears, because on September 14th I wrote something I had almost forgotten. As I wrote:

Truth Telling continues

“When I began listening again I heard music I never heard in the late 1980’s & 1990’s but now find I really like Don’t Dream It’s Over by Crowded House.. . .and a song I was dreaming about when I woke up this morning, Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears. Those lyrics were repeated several times in my dreams in the early morning hours.”

I wrestled with what the dream meant for 8 days before writing this article. What was the source of my dream? What was I to take from dreaming those lyrics repeatedly? I went back and forth trying to understand if God was speaking mysteriously to me, or was it to lure me away from God?

Seemingly on an opposite but parallel course, I have been writing about what I believe are false teachings on spiritual warfare equating false gods and goddesses as demonic entities.

I wondered if my attraction to this particular song and for Tears for Fears was a spiritual test for me.

Could I really be brought back under the idolatry of music that ruled my early life? Could I not enjoy the music without becoming obsessed by it? Would I fixate on the two young musicians as I did in music industry days? These are questions I asked myself. We have to be honest as we can with ourselves.

All the last week I could not get enough of listening to this particular song and watching them perform it onstage 40 years after it was a number #1 hit. It is one of those timeless songs because it is so well crafted it will always sound fresh. I appreciate music like that, but music is no longer a matter of idolatry to me.

God gives us all gifts. Lucifer, who became Satan through pride and desire to worshipped as a god, was an angel gifted as a musician, a worshipper. We have these gifts of God and how we use them is up to us. But it is God who gives us giftings in the first place. We can start out misusing our gifts and end up letting our gifts glorify God. That is the only path I want.

After studying their recent performances, I decided to listen to some YouTube interviews with them. Some when they were very young, and then as they began to age.

The first thing I discovered was that they had childhoods that were chaotic and lived in a poverty that shamed them.

I watch a lot of British movies and TV shows, so when they began to express the shame they felt in childhood from living on a council estate, I understood. Then Curt Smith put it American terms: they lived in the “projects”.

I understood why that shame went forward with them even as they were chart-topping like crazy. It is hard to lose these images of ourselves even when we are enjoying the opposite in success. There are always the thoughts, ‘I’m not really good enough’.

When I was in elementary/grade school, we were poor but I didn’t realize it because of our closely knit ties with my mother’s family. We had grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, great aunts and uncles in close proximity, so we lacked nothing in our eyes, certainly did not feel deprived.

But when the proverbial spit hit the fan when I was 12 and our next ‘home’ was in the projects, then I knew shame. Shame of living in the projects, shame of divorced parents. I went from a innocent country girl into a junior high school where girls fought each other like boys and girls belonged to gangs. I never knew that went on anywhere. I was pretty terrified of being beaten up. And then the Beatles came out, my closest friends were Beatlemaniacs too and I threw myself into being conscious only of music.

That was the first thing that touched me about Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal of Tears for Fears. They threw themselves into making music to escape the things that shamed and terrified them about life. Roland tells that they had the goal to ‘make hits, make money and get therapy.’ That is the gist and Roland still repeats that to this day.

Orzabal was quite serious about wanting therapy to heal his wounds. He obviously made up his mind early in life to be disarmingly truthful in expressing his emotions. And he still is in the interviews just the past month that I saw him in

I get that. It was the same defense I took for myself – to know my emotions and to be disarmingly truthful about them. I just do it in my writing more than verbally.

Orzabal is even more up front truthful than I am, and it has made me see – at least I believe – we both use it as a defensive shield against being hurt even if it makes people uncomfortable. We preemptively explain ourselves through a shocking level of honesty.

Tears for Fears first album was called, The Hurting, and it was “A dark, introspective concept album heavily inspired by Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy which also inspired the band’s name.”

Later in life they laugh and say that Primal Scream was really about “blaming the parents.” But Roland Orzabal was serious about getting therapy to heal his wounds and apparently took himself through Janov’s Primal Scream therapy.

I was aware of Primal Scream therapy. Janov’s book was published in 1970, but he was already leading therapy sessions in the late 1960’s. For me, I wanted no part of psychology, which I viewed as pointless fads that therapists put desperate people through to no avail.

It was because I had been exposed to all the different psychological methods they tried on my mother after diagnosing her as a paranoid schizophrenic by the time I was about 13. None of them paid off. Utter failures in my eyes. I became hostile to therapy because of that, and also to being dragged into family counseling and individual therapy when I was around 15. They told me I was “strong” and that they “wanted to know why”. Yeah, right.

I was not strong, I was determined I didn’t want to be there being treated like I was mentally ill when it was my mother who needed to be healed. I would never have done anything like Primal Scream therapy, it looked quite the opposite of what I wanted in my life. Like LSD, which I wondered why anyone would want to take something that put them into madness.

I preferred to self-medicate with alcohol, dancing with abandon, music, music, music. . .and sex. All of those are part of the music business experience.

Though we take our individual paths from similar circumstances we try to apply our own choice of ‘balms’ to soothe our wounded souls.

This may be the reality that has drawn me over the past few weeks to learn more about Tears for Fears. There is some reason I dreamed their lyrics repeatedly just a little over a week ago.

Borrowing a couple of paragraphs from something I wrote after watching one review, “. . . .what I saw in this video exploring their development in music, is really two wounded men seeking healing. You would be surprised really at how many musicians and singers fit that description. They use their own methods of trying to gain healing from stardom, fan adoration, applause, which of course only masks the underlying pain they are rebelling from.”

I would like to insert here that in the interview I saw a couple of days ago with Adam Carolla, after really wild success and many hits, the two of them began to shrink back from wanting to do concerts. I had heard an earlier clip of Curt Smith saying how fans had ripped the shirt off of his back. They didn’t like the craziness of the fans. Orzabal told Carolla the story of how they were inside a venue before a concert and girls were at the back door screaming in a frenzy, so he walked out and just talked to them like a normal human being and it brought the screaming frenzy to a halt. And that’s what he wanted.

Folks, the screaming frenzy is an example of the idolatry in action and most music stars live for that. But not these guys, as Orzabal said they realized they didn’t want the tours they just wanted to be in the studio making music. Being able to bring music to life was what it was about them, not being idolized so much.

“In a final summarization of the deep dive video into the music of Tears for Fears, someone said of Everybody Wants to Rule the World, that: “They’ve always made music for the broken, but this time it looks to the future with a realistic ray of hope shouting to the human condition and encapsulating their ideology as a whole.”

That line really jumped out at me, “music for the broken”. There is a whole lot of that going on.

Yesterday after wrapping up a study I had been working on for three days about false gods that were judged in the 10 plagues on Egyptian false gods, I turned again to watch some more recent Tears for Fears interviews.

Roland Orzabal has a book out, Welcome to Your Life, and he has been doing the rounds of video interviews in the last month with all sorts of people from Megyn Kelly to Adam Carolla, with music interviews in between.

I did appreciate hearing more of who they have grown in to. In 2008, Curt Smith released an autobiographical album called Half Pleased, that explores Smith’s relationships with his children, parents and friends. They are both men who think about the meaning in their lives.

I watched something in the interview with Adam Carolla with Roland Orzabal that finally settled it to me that I should write this article about Tears for Fears and how I relate to their experiences in my own life.

I think if there is one thing lacking in Christian outreach it is the hiding we do from everyone of what we really came out of. What we overcame. I do believe many are turned away because we present ourselves like we’ve always been the way we are now. Friends and family know better. Maybe that is why we have such a hard time reaching some of them. Not that we revert back to how we were, but we don’t bury it deep in the closet of shame of where we were when God plucked us out of our abyss.

With Carolla, Roland was talking about unexpectedly losing his wife in 2017 to liver disease. He described her as having been his soul mate, dating since they were mid-teens and married in 1982 just before their debut single, Mad World. They had two sons.

In another interview Roland admits that he and his wife always drank wine but never realized that wine could lead to alcoholism and her death from cirrhosis. When she died in 2017 he tells that his own drinking spiraled out of control and he ended up in rehab. In 2018 he ended up in the hospital four times.

As I wrote earlier in the week, having a wide open tab at the Dallas Agora Ballroom so I could schmoose industry people, almost did me in too. I understand what happens when alcohol is your self-medication of choice.

As for Roland his drinking spiral about did him in too. He admits, “I had anxi­ety off the scale, sui­cidal ideation.”

He also said in another interview he had to tell the truth that even before his wife died he had started falling in love with Emily, who he married in 2020. Emily is a much younger woman, and their daugh­ter, Eula, was born in 2022.

Now 64, speaking with Adam Carolla, Roland began to speak about becoming a father again. He spoke about how when his boys were children they were in a large country house in England and it was very safe. Then with his new baby he becomes a “girl-Dad” so his protective instincts go through the roof!

They are living in the US now, first Colorado, then Los Angeles and now in a New England state, and he does not have the sense of it being safe like he did when his boys were growing up.

Then there is the touching moment when Roland talks about taking his one month old daughter in his arms to nestle on his chest to sleep. Suddenly his face lights up.

He tells Carolla, “I’m not a religious person, per se, but that’s God! That’s what God feels like, its an incredible feeling. This light! Even though she is just a month old, the chemistry that’s coming from her heart to my heart is absolutely stunning.”

That is what God feels like. When you find God’s love you never want to let it go, I know I haven’t wanted to.

Now Roland’s memoirs book has a lot of astrology in it along with his life story. When I first returned to the LORD I had a lot of spiritual paganism still clinging to me too, but I have great hope that God is revealing Himself to Roland and Curt. I do pray that God will turn their Tears for Fears into “shouts of joy and victory” Psalm 118:15

Since returning to faith in God in 1983 I have never once read my horoscope, and I was into astrology big time too. A proud Leo, I got charts done on myself and read every horoscope prediction I could get my hands on.

That is no longer something I give heed to, like the false gods and idolatries I embraced. Believing the stars can predict or explain my life better than God is just not something I care to entertain any longer. It would cut me off from hearing from God and that is the most necessary thing in my life today.

All I can tell you is that I have begun to pray for these two guys and their families, that God would speak to them, draw them into the kingdom of God. Also that at long last God will heal all the wounds they have carried over a life time. Those wounds are torments I pray they will be fully freed from.

People are people. No matter what our lives have been like, no matter what our sins, God wants greater things for us. He wants full blessing to enter our hearts and souls and to be set free from all the chains that have bound us. This has been an eye opening experience for me to deep dive into Tears for Fears and see so many similarities that were the same in my life…and to experience a real compassion for them over those things.

I have walked through many of the same hurts they have. It is everything to be healed and able to love as we are loved by God.

When I first turned to God, I wanted all my friends in the music industry to know. I have always had compassion for so many of them knowing their personal stories. May God do a mighty revealing of Himself in music circles. If He does not reveal Himself, they will never know.

“And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.” — Ephesians 3:18