Tears For Fears - Songs From The Big Chair

180-gram LP reissue

Features "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" and "Shout!"

Tears for Fears' biggest-selling album Songs From The Big Chair was their second record, and the 10 million-selling disc marked a transition in the band's sound, catapulting them into international prominence.

As a group, Tears for Fears led the "Second British Invasion" of pop music in the mid-1980s in both the U.S. and Europe with songs from the album that dominated the radio airwaves. In the U.S., "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" led the Songs from the Big Chair single releases, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1985. "Shout" was the band's second single and stayed at No. 1 for three weeks. The album inevitably went straight to No. 1, selling 5 million copies in the U.S. alone.

Songs from the Big Chair peaked at No. 2 on the U.K. album charts and remained in the Top 10 for more than six months. The album went on to yield the hit singles "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" (which spent 14 weeks in the U.K. Top 5 and peaked at No. 2) and "Shout," which reached No. 4 and remained on the chart for 16 weeks. Both became global smash hits.

Named after psychotherapist Arthur Janov's primal scream theories — which suggest that adult problems often relate back to parental abandonment during childhood, and that confronting such issues is essential to one's development — Tears for Fears, and key members Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith — transcended their broken-home backgrounds by turning their raw feelings into self-expressive songs etched with equal parts tenderness and directness, earnestness and melancholy. After a promising synthpop-based debut, the duo took its finely crafted art up several notches on Songs From the Big Chair, one of the period's most introspective and incisive pop works.