Roland Orzabal Shares What Tears for Fears Bandmate Curt Smith Thinks of His Astrology-Influenced Memoir
Categoria: Musica
The stars aligned for Orzabal's new book, Welcome to Your Life: Love, Death and Tears For Fears.
Por Billboard | 03/08/2026
Thanks to being half of Tears For Fears , Roland Orzabal has certainly had a life and career to shout about. But doing that himself was not really on his bingo card. Related Tears for Fears Is on a Creative High: ‘We Still Have a Desire to Get Better’ Fans Choose Ariana Grande's 'Petal' as This Week's Favorite New Music Ariana Grande Taking a Break After Tour Amid Ongoing Public Scrutiny Orzabal — whose Welcome to Your Life: Love, Death and Tears For Fears (Dey Street) publishes on Aug. 4 — had no desire to write a memoir. He’d written a novel, 2014’s Sex, Drugs & Opera, and was, in fact, shopping another one, Truthwall , when his literary agent Mark Gottlieb broached the autobiography idea. “Every time he took (the new novel) to a publisher, they would say, ‘What about a memoir?'” the British-born Orzabal, 64, tells Billboard via Zoom from his current home on the south coast of Massachusetts. “So he said, ‘Have you ever thought about writing a memoir?’ And I said, ‘No, I haven’t.’ But I always wanted to write about astrology because I’ve been studying it for 40 years, and I always wanted to write about metaphysics, my philosophy, my take on life, my understanding of the human condition. So I thought maybe I could combine the two and explain my life astrologically — along with Tears For Fears, obviously. And Mark said to me, ‘Just write three or four chapters and leave it with me.'” The result is a 268-page tome that Orzabal further subtitled An Astrological Memoir , with a foreword dubbed “Warning: This Book Contains Astrology” to explain his fascination and introduce the concept. Welcome To Your Life makes plenty of references to star patterns and Zodiac signs in explaining some of the events in Orzabal’s life, but he worked hard to make sure that never interferes with the narrative readers come for. “My initial feeling was to weave it in like a tapestry,” Orzabal explains, but his publisher, Carrie Thornton, instead recommended he “put it in as interstitials at the end of a chapter, so people can read the story and ignore the astrology. I understand that completely. The astrology is another layer of explanation, and once I attempted it a few times I thought, ‘Yeah, this is brilliant.’ I spread it throughout the book, so it becomes more understandable, and if someone doesn’t want to get into it, it’s easy enough to skip it.” Let It All Out His bandmate Curt Smith apparently felt that way when Orzabal sent him an early edition of the memoir. “He texted me or emailed me and he’s just finished it, and he was in tears, so I thought that was a good sign,” Orzabal recalls. “And then I said to him, ‘What do you think of the astrology?’ and he said, ‘Oh, I didn’t read that,’ or ‘I didn