Top 55 Curt Smith Quotes

We know we have a method of reaching people, but we have never wanted to preach. We like to make our views palatable, music that is easy to swallow, and I think we’ve done that.

More than anything else, being famous just didn’t agree with me.

Having lawyers involved never leads to good things.

Sometimes albums can be quick, sometimes they take forever, and we’re very good at taking forever.

You never stop trying to make progress as a musician.

For me, I didn’t want to be famous and there was a desire to be me and not ‘that guy from the band’ so I was happy to see it all go.

Mad World’ was easy for me to sing because I could relate to Roland’s lyrics. We were both the middle of three sons and had been brought up by single mothers with absent fathers.

Our own lives always influence the way we write.

You know, if you ever listen to your voice on an answering machine everyone thinks we sound dreadful. That’s sort of the way I think when I hear myself speak.

I saw a band called The Electric Guitars, from Bristol. I described them to Roland, and he just started playing a riff on guitar and said, ‘Do they sound like this?’ And they did.

We really hated being in a band. The joy for us and why we slipped nicely and neatly into it was because we didn’t need a band anymore. We became a duo because of technology.

Normally doing an album you go from track to track and go, ‘Let’s not work on this one today, let’s go work on the other one,’ and I think you tend to get more self-indulgent that way.

I see bands that have been around for a long time who go through the motions. They’re tired and they shouldn’t really be doing it any more. We are doing it because we like it.

A lot of songs we’ve written have been political, but they’re also personally political.

My daughters prefer Tears for Fears songs as they’re more upbeat and generic. Dad’s songs are ‘a little too sad’ for them, which just means that they’re harder to understand.

I have two kids and they were by no means blank slates. One is exactly like me, one is exactly like my wife.

It’s always good to be somewhere with some history, maybe that’s England, which has a long history.

We rushed to finish the album when ‘Mad World’ became a hit. The pressure was on and it stopped being as enjoyable as it had been; in the end, it wasn’t enjoyable at all.

What happens with writing a song and demoing it, for me the demo always becomes the master.

People forgot about us, which was what we wanted. We could be left alone without any pressure to make music.

We’ve influenced other artists, and when younger generations become fans of those artists and hear about us, they discover our music too.

Tears For Fears is my ultimate passion.

You find it hard to deal with certain things and as you get older it becomes easier.

I view making records as a journey.

We’ve never considered ourselves overtly political, but when it comes to English politics – people like Margaret Thatcher – you cannot just stand by and ignore all that’s happening around us.

Tears for Fears is me and Roland.

When you’re writing songs for yourself, as all artists do, it’s about ‘me.’ It’s about what you feel and your emotions. You’re trying to get something out of your system about your experiences.

MySpace is just spam central. I mean, every day I just get mail inviting me to gigs that are nowhere near Los Angeles!

For a lot of bands, the London club scene very much starts to become more important than the music they create. Which we never want to happen.

I went to live in New York and released a solo album that I now know was very bad. Roland kept on with the Tears For Fears name. It was a bad split.

We’ve never been a musically fashionable band. We’ve been successful, but I think that has something to do with us never following the trends.

Japanese Breakfast has recorded a beautiful, ethereal reimagining of ‘Head Over Heels.’

I think Roland read ‘Primal Scream’ first and then gave it to me. This was, I think, even prior to ‘The Graduate’ days. We both got heavily into and it offered a lot of questions about how screwed up our home life was.

We’ve always been slammed by most of the British press. They probably hate us because we’re too normal and incredibly honest.

I’m becoming hip to my children because bands of their generation name us as influences, so you can definitely hear it, the same way as we were influenced by other people.

We are lucky to have had the longevity we’ve had, garnering new people. I’ve even become cool to my daughters’ friends.

I hate touring beyond measure. I don’t like all the travelling and the hotel rooms. But the hour and a half on stage each night keep me going.

There’s something rhythmic about running, so it’s not surprising that I love it. I’m a bass player, after all.

Solo, you don’t have compromise. It gets back to what’s great when you’re a musician.

I live 10 miles outside of Bath, where there are about 10 houses. So it’s nice and peaceful and quiet. Keeps your feet on the ground, basically.

I went through a divorce during the ‘Seeds of Love’ album.

We’re both getting older, our children are starting to leave home. But I can say that I’m just as passionate a songwriter now in my 50s as I was in my 20s. But instead of talking about the general kind of angst that I felt as a teenager, I’m writing about more specific issues.

When we play live show we tend to find there’s a whole portion that’s a considerably younger demographic. That’s quite gratifying. They primarily seem to be into ‘The Hurting’ which I guess makes sense.

We were touring the States tied to a load of drum machines and sequencers and synthesizers, playing to hundreds of thousands of people and yet feeling strangely removed from the music.

I guess because we’re essentially a two-man band, we’re attracting Wham’s crowd. But Wham! are more of a businessman’s band.

It’s incredibly cool that R & B artists like Kanye and the Weekend, who from a completely different genre to us have tapped into ‘The Hurting.’

I normally don’t do interviews on the road.

I think people forget even though we were labelled a synth band because of ‘The Hurting,’ but keyboards are not our native instruments. Roland’s a guitar player and I’m a bass player.

In the music business, we’re much better off staying in Bath – we don’t get involved in the competitiveness, where you’ve got to be seen in the right places and music kind of takes second place.

We’ve been playing together since we were 13, and from the age of 18, we’ve had a record contract. I think that we’ve been incredibly lucky, yeah. But we deserve it.

At the height of our fame, we didn’t see anything. We didn’t leave the hotel because we were doing interviews all day. We may have traveled the world, but we saw nothing.

We just weren’t a hip band. I mean we recorded our second album in Bath at a time when everyone else was recording in New York or Los Angeles.

American rock was, and still is to some extent, a closed shop. REO Speedwagon, Toto, Boston, Foreigner all those bands, and I wouldn’t be able to tell which from which.

Songwriting I think, or any art form, the inspiration comes from your personal life or it can be from politics or region you live in.

The synth helped us in that it meant you didn’t have to be a traditional four-piece band and basically, you didn’t have to work too hard.