Episode 241 - Seal - podcast episode cover

Episode 241 - Seal

Dec 07, 202239 min
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Summary

In this episode, Seal delves into his unique songwriting process, revealing how formative experiences and key collaborations shaped his iconic sound. He shares candid stories behind hits like "Kiss From A Rose," detailing its rocky path to global success, and "Crazy," explaining his deliberate shift to find an authentic musical identity. The conversation highlights the profound influence of producer Trevor Horn, emphasizing the art of record-making as a narrative, and Seal's enduring passion for the unpredictable, collaborative alchemy of creating music.

Episode description

To mark the release of a new deluxe reissue of his eponymous debut, Seal joins Simon and Brian for a conversation about his songwriting process. The singer-songwriter discusses classic hits like 'Killer', 'Crazy' and 'Kiss From A Rose' and explains why the alchemy of songwriting still has him passionate about making music.

Transcript

Intro / Opening

🎵 Music

Seal's Journey: Early Life to Hits

C

Welcome everyone to Soda Jacker on Songwriting. I'm Brian, joined as always by Simon, and with us today for episode 241 is a Grammy and Ivanovella winning British singer and songwriter possessed of one of the most instantly identifiable voices in music.

B

To date he's sold over 30 million albums worldwide, as well as collaborated with the likes of Jeff Beck, Joni Mitchell, David Foster, Wendy and Lisa, Santana, Pink, and John Legend.

C

As this episode reaches you, his Smash Hit Eponymous 1991 debut album, produced by the legendary Trevor Horn, has just been reissued in a lavish new 4 CD 2LP deluxe set with a slew of juicy extras. We're delighted to welcome the one and only Seal to the show.

B

Our guest was born Seal Henry Samuel in Paddington, London in nineteen sixty three, to a Nigerian mother and Brazilian father, and fostered shortly afterwards to a family in Romford, Essex. He returned to his biological parent in London when he was four, and his first musical memory is of sitting under his mum's sewing machine listening to the Dion Warwick and Motown records she regularly played around the house.

C

Though he discovered a natural affinity for singing at an early age, the young seal kept it very much to himself. It was aged eleven, at the encouragement of one of his teachers, Mr Wren, that he performed Johnny Nash's I Can See Clearly Now at a school concert, to the utter astonishment of his parents who were present in the audience and until that point had never heard their son sing.

B

Having run away from home when he was fifteen, Seal found himself homeless by seventeen, but managed to take courses in architecture and electrical engineering while living in squats or sleeping rough and doing a variety of menial jobs. He continued to sing but only to entertain his friends, until in his early twenties, while working in the fashion industry, a girlfriend persuaded him to invest in some musical and recording equipment and take a serious crack at a career in music.

C

Seal sent the resulting homemade demos to record companies, but they garnered little interest. Around the same time, a drummer friend, Big Audio Dynamite's Greg Roberts, gave him a cassette compilation of artists like Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, and Sly in the Family Stone.

This proved epiphanic for our guest to the extent that he stopped writing for a year and spent it just consuming music, as well as learning to play guitar. The first song he wrote after this hiatus, incidentally, was a little ditty called Crazy.

B

He began his professional singing career with a London funk outfit called Push. While on a short tour of Asia with the band, Seal opted to remain in the Far East, where he continued to work on his songwriting, Upon his return to the UK twelve months later, Seal met techno DJ Adam Tinley, AKA Adamsky, and wound up contributing lyrics and vocals to his track Killer.

The resultant one hundred percent certified banger wound up topping the UK singles chart for a month and put Seal well and truly on the map, earning its composers a nineteen ninety one Ivanovello Award into the bargain.

C

Following a record company Bidding War, Seal opted to sign with our former guest Trevor Horn's ZT label. He'd go on to make several albums with Trevor at the production helm, including, of course, 1991's Seal. which debuted at number one when Quin Tupole Platinum won three Brit Awards and yielded the Smash Hit single on both sides of the Atlantic in the aforementioned Crazy, which incidentally also earned our guest another ivor.

B

Its nineteen ninety-four follow-up, also entitled Seal, did good business too, but following the inclusion of the song Kiss From a Rose on the Batman Forever soundtrack the following spring, sales of the album picked up and it eventually achieved multi-platinum status. Kiss from a Rose was also a US number one and won three awards at the 1996 Grammys.

C

1998's Human Being didn't fare so well commercially but is a sorely overlooked entry in the catalogue. Other studio offerings include two thousand seven's System, twenty ten's SEAL six commitments, produced by the great David Foster, and twenty fifteen's Seven, which saw our guest reunite with his old pal Trevor Horn.

B

Seal has also turned interpreter for two collections of soul covers, the aptly titled Soul and Soul Two, as well as tackling the Great American songbook on twenty seventeen's Grammy nominated Standard Song.

C

If you're a first time listener to the show and enjoy this episode, be sure to follow, rate and review us on your favoured podcast platform, as well as check out our huge back catalogue of interviews with top songwriters like SEAL. You can find us on all the socials under So the Jerker.

B

If you'd like to aid us in keeping this completely independent show ad and sponsor free, give whatever you can spare at sodajerka.com slash donate.

C

Before we continue, a thousand thanks to Julian for his help setting this up.

B

Okay, here we are with the one and only seal.

🎵 Music

Revisiting Debut: Objective Listening

B

Well it's uh great to get to ask you about your songwriting and stuff. Getting an opportunity to talk to you, especially with this new deluxe edition of your debut is a really nice uh moment for us.

A

Right. Thank you. Me too.

B

It must be interesting for you to look back songwriting wise. I guess there's the opportunity for you to see how much you've changed and grown as a songwriter when you look back, but also to be reminded of the alchemy of those songs and how special they are. Do you find them exciting or surprising in any way when you look back?

A

Embarrassing for the most part. There's one or two gems in there, but for the most part I tend to listen back with a critical ear. Something I'm trying not to do as much. But you know. I had a funny experience a while back in in Mexico. I used to have a place down there. I decided to take a trip into town about an hour and a half away with a friend of mine. And the only CD in that car was my first album. And it was either that or Mexican radio.

So we chose the former, but this must have been about sort of, I don't know, 20, 22 years after the event. And the interesting thing was that we played it from beginning to end. And that was the first time I actually really enjoyed it. I was able to listen to it objectively.

rather than, oh, I wish I'd sang that bit better or was I really being sincere there? You know, which is what I tend to do as a songwriter. So I was able to kind of see for the first time what it was that people liked about the album. It was full of kind of idealism and optimism and positivity and hope, and then the songs were sort of quite quirky, they didn't curl all the way around, but you liked them somehow.

C

Right, yeah.

A

And I think that's kind of the hallmark of British artists in general, particularly when we travel, when we travel and come to places like America, the influences were clear. They just hadn't quite heard it put together like that. You know, if you take a song like Kiss from a Rose, for example, which is the second album, Trevor always used to make me laugh because he would say, well, it's a kind of medieval English Baroque wall.

C

Yeah.

A

Mm-hmm. With R and B stops in it. Like, baby. Like what is that really? It's all over the show. And I think before that nobody had heard them sort of put together in my own unique way. It's when we start trying to like cop what has been done previously. That's when things start to get boring. But if you can kind of Stay true to oneself, then you stand a chance.

C

Yeah. It's kind of an otherworldly piece of music, isn't it? You know, you've got all these vocal hooks which are sort of wordless and they overlap with each other, and then as you said, it's kind of a waltz feel, and then there's the imagery of the lyrics. You know, when it snows my eyes become large. They're actually quite unusual things and for a smash song like that it does have quite a lot of strange and unusual things in it, I think.

The 'Kiss From A Rose' Saga

A

Yeah, God knows what I was on about, but yes. I don't know whether you know the story behind um behind Kiss from Rose. You ever heard a story behind it?

C

Well, we had the sense that you had it in your back pockets for quite a long time, is that right?

A

Yeah, it started as an experiment. I mean, I don't know how old you are, but back in the day we used to demo on these four tracks, you know, Fostex and Tascam two four four.

And I just got one of these things and I I was trying to figure out how to multi-track on it and I couldn't play an instrument at the time. So I started writing this song called Kiss from a Rose, like and I I layered I think seventeen or eighteen tracks of vocals and I was trying to imitate an orchestra, which is why it has that sort of elaborate orchestral feel. Da da da da da da da da string line or an obo line. And then you'd have your pizzicato strings going da-da-da-ba-ba-da-da-da.

So anyway, I was doing things like that. I was multi-tracking and then I did a demo and I didn't really think that much of it. And you know, the couple of years after that, I got signed and a friend of mine says, you know. Trevor, you should get Sil to play this rose song he's got. It's really good. And Trevor would ask me about it and I would go, oh I don't know what he's talking about. And I never really played it to anyone.

And so we recorded the first album and that song never saw the light of day. It's same thing um when it came to recording the second album, you know. Trevor, get Seal to play you this rose song that he's got. And Trevor would be like, What's Paul talking about, this rose song that he's and I'd go, oh no, it's just this thing that I did and I wouldn't play it. Anyway, long story short, finally.

Trevor kept on pestering me and I said, Okay, look, it goes like this, right? And I and I played him this demo, and his eyes got, you know, like, you know. Trevor used to wear those big glasses and and I could always see like whenever his eyes got really huge brown it was like, Oh, I wanted something because

Why don't you just like step into the uh you know, into the vocal booth and just uh put that thing down. So anyway, I went in there for an hour and I put the majority of the vocal tracks down or what I had. And then he was like, Oh yeah, let me have a crack at this and you know, and he sent it, I think it was off to Betsy Cook at the time she was the arranger, he sent it off, got an arrangement done and played it to me and then asked me to come and sing.

the rest of it. And then I went in and kind of did a lot of the vocals again and God, they had multiple tracks of each backing vocal, each harmony had at least eight tracks. Trevor, back in those days, you know, before auto tune and all that. He'd put me to work and he'd get me to keep singing it until I got one really good track and and we'd build up each harmony like that, you know, the old way of doing them. And then he finished it.

And played it to me and I said, Oh, I don't really like it. You know, I said, I like it, but it doesn't really belong on the album. You know, I don't think it represents what I'm about. And he went, Yeah, you're right and we took it off the album and then um a friend of mine, do you remember Lynn Frank's big PR woman in uh in England, friend of mine?

And she, you know, she was like my confidant, and she came round and I asked her to listen to the album. And she sat in in the control room and played the album. And we'd taken Kiss from Rose off. And I said, what did you think of the album? And she went, I really like that Rose song. And I went, Oh, for fuck's sake, Trevor played it to you, did he? And she went, Yeah. I go, yeah, but what about the rest of it? What about prayer for the diner?

she goes yeah she goes i really like that rose song right and so um anyway so the song ended up back on the album And we released the album after that. I think a Prayer for the Dime was the first single and did all right. And then a couple of others, I can't remember what it was. And Kiss for Moreau was the fourth single to be released from that album. And I remember it went into the chart.

63, dropped to 80 something the next week and was done. It was over. It was over. That was the end of it. You know, I was already back in the studio making human beings. And then um man by the name of Joel Schumacher, God rest his soul. called me up and he said, You know, Seal, I'm a big fan of yours. Um I'm making this movie called Batman Forever. And I need something for the love scene. And I said, Well

Joel, thanks for thinking of me, but I don't have anything, you know. I've I've just finished promoting the second album. I'm back in the studio making The third album and I don't really have anything. And Bob Cavallo, who used to be Prince's manager, was my manager. He was on the phone call at the time and he he said, Don't worry, I'll send you something. And Cavallo sends A copy of my second album to Joel and puts an asterisk next to Kiss from Rose. He says, listen to this song.

And so Schumacher calls back the next day and he goes, I tempt the song in the scene. It doesn't work. But I just love the song so much. I'm going to stick it on the end credits, right? And so the movie came out and you two had the the end credits. And after that, King Kiss Rose, what happened was the last thing that people heard when they were coming out of the movie theater was baby.

You know, and then four Grammys and eight million albums later, then you know, oh we always knew. Well no one knew. No one knew anything, you know. It was always a good song. It was always a good song. I'll never deny that.

Trevor Horn: Architect of Records

But it was an odd song. Yeah. It didn't quite sound like anything else you'd ever heard before. And a lot of that can be attributed to Trevor's genius. He saw the record when

🎵 Music

A

Trevor struck me as like that kid that we know at school. You know there's that kid that's always really good at jigsaw puzzles. You know, like whereas we would see, you know, two thousand pieces just scattered on a table. He would go, oh, all right, okay, there's the corners. He'd be able to see it. You know, he's that kid, like when it came to music.

I still don't know how to make records. I know how to write songs and put melodies together. But records, it that's a different talent. And I think it's an art form that is somewhat for the most part, not in all cases, forgotten today. Yeah. The art of making records. It's a whole different thing to having a collection of really good songs.

C

Yeah, I mean Trevor Horn really does elevate the record making process, doesn't he? And that's something that comes across listening to that first album. And there's so much space in there as well. The production really allows the music to breathe, especially on a song like Whirlpool, which is so stripped down.

A

Yeah, yeah, he was always great like that. I learned so much from Trevor that, you know, a record has to be like a good book or a good movie. It has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the beginning is crucial. You know, if you think about it, you go see a a movie, something has to happen within the first ten minutes. There has to be some justification for you. Sitting down for the next

Hour and 40 minutes. There has to be a device. If you take a movie like the great movie like that Christopher Nolan Batman movie, you know, with uh Heath Ledger. Remember that movie?

C

Yeah, yeah, The Dark Knight, I think.

A

The Dark Knight. Remember how you went in? Do you remember what the first scene was? It was that robbery, wasn't it? There was a scene where people were zip lining across and then you saw this face of the Joker. God, it just kept you on the edge of your seat. You're in. That's the device. That's the thing that justifies your attention span. An album has to kind of be like that. And Trevor is really the person who drummed that into me. For example, On our first record was uh the beginning.

It's upbeat, you know, not quite sure what I'm talking about, but then it's like the music takes you round and round and it's like, yeah, okay, this is all right. Like, you know, okay. I'm not quite sure what it is, mind you, but I like it. You've got my interest. Same thing on the second album. Bring it on. Bring it on. Oh, okay. Oh, what is this? I'm not quite sure, but I'm curious. Trevor used to make records. for people that used to go into do you remember in the old record stores?

used to have listening booths where you'd go put your earphones on and you'd listen to the first few tracks, you'd skip through them. That would determine whether or not you picked up the record. Well Trevor used to think about that. You used to think about like, okay, the first track, whilst it doesn't have to be a single, it has to be a device. That draws you in, that gets you in. And then the second one has to do something similar. And now I can get into telling the story.

And you know, that's one of the many factors of what goes into making a record. Not a collection of great songs, entirely different, a record. Something that you put on. And you listen to and before you know where you are, you've listened to the whole album. That was Trevor's

🎵 Music

Deconstructing 'Killer' & Collaboration

B

I can see that concept applying to individual tracks as well. I mean something like Killer, you know, you've got that baseline which is just irresistible, isn't it? And then the placement of the words on top of that and that leap into sort of falsetto that you do and the way the back and vocals are kind of peppered in there, it's all creating interest, isn't it, to keep

the listener on the hook. And then of course you you're adding those interesting phrases like solitary brother or solitary sister and then they're not predictable phrases, I don't think. So, you know, you're giving the listener a lot to get their teeth into.

A

Well, killer is a a slightly different case, you know, and a lot of the credit for Killer I attribute to Adamski, to Adam. You know, one of my uh mantras to myself when it comes to making music or something that I always tell my musicians. Is why play a bass line when you can play a hook? And the same could be said with Adams.

Back in track, you know, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. I mean, you sing that as I just done to anyone of our generation or thereabouts, they'll know what you're talking about. Just from that, without the vocal. Sure. Boom, boom, boom, boom, but they go, Oh, I've heard that before. And when you get something like that, as a singer or a songwriter, you like the song sort of sings itself.

They're a hook in and of themselves, they're a melody, but there are holes in them that you can find the pockets where you can sing. It's syncopated in a way that I mean, someone like myself, maybe not for all people, but oh, I salivate when it comes to things like that because I can move around it in an interesting way. Funny thing with killer, I remember Adam and I talked about working together for ages and

It was the first of January nineteen ninety. I walked into the studio and he played me this backing track called The Killer. And I had written something like it was terrible ages before called Killer. It was like a kind of pastiche of a wannabe Led Zeppelin song. It kind of went, so You won't put do-do-do-do-do-ton-dum dum To be free. But do put a little dum dum dum. Live your life.

And, you know, again, that you know, is one of many things that never saw the light of day. But he said, Oh, that's called the killer. I said, I've got this thing that I wrote. called killer. And so now with Adam's bass I'm going dom and all I had to do was show you what.

🔊 Screaming

And I went, Oh yeah, cool. I I I like it too. I wasn't quite sure. It was really quick'cause I only didn't for about that one. And I sang it and then I took away a rough demo of it and listened to it. I'm going, yes, but it needs something else. It just needs one more thing. There was a quite a lot going on in the rest of the track, you know. And I thought, okay, I know it needs another vocal hook.

But

A

I'm not quite sure where to find it. And then I listened to the track and there was a little kind of synthing, you could barely hear it. It was going ow ow oh ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow o ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow and I went, oh

🔊 Screaming

And so I called up Adam the next day and I went, Adam, you gotta let me come in this should I've got this. Okay, she's got no, I've got it, I've got no, trust me, you've got to let me come in. She said, All right. So I went in the next day.

And I sang that solitary brother is a still a part of you. And that was kind of spawned out of like the dance scene, the rave scene, the warehouse, what we were experiencing. The lyrics sort of came from all of that. And that was meant to kind of embody that uh

That feeling. Yeah. That's how the song came together. That's how those hooks came together. Even though I was right into that rave culture, I Still believed in songs and I knew that you had to come at it with something more, otherwise, it would just be another really

🎵 Music

C

It seems like collaboration's been pretty crucial to you throughout your career. I mean, obviously Adamsky helps start everything off, and then you've got people like Trevor, who you've had a long working relationship with, and also Guy Sigsworth, with whom you wrote several tracks on the debut album, not least crazy.

A

Yeah, I didn't. I mean, he likes to claim that we did, but he's all right. But anyway, yes, mate, I give it up. You know, for me, the thing that I love most.

About

A

The actual art of songwriting, or me being a recording artist, or performing, the thing that I love most more than anything else. is the collaborative aspect of it. I often say, I don't care whether you're Prince, Sting, or whoever, if you look, you will find that it was a collaborative Process, you will find that there were a whole team of people that enable that to happen.

The True Origin of 'Crazy'

B

So what is the origin story of uh a song like Crazy Then? Seal, how did that one evolve?

A

So it started like this. I had written for a couple of years, I was working in a recording studio, Beethoven Street Studios. I'd written a bunch of songs over a period of a year and a half to two years. Most of them shine. I'd taken them around to record companies. And they also he's got an interesting voice, but what is he? And I just thought, you know, call it youthful arrogance or or whatever. I just thought they were deaf.

I could hear it, right? Now in retrospect, I look back and they were shy. The songs were shite. And so um the drummer from Big Audio Dynamite made me a cassette tape and on it was Hendrix. CSN, Zeppelin, and a few other people. And I remember going away and listening to this tape. And I went, oh, that's why I'm not being signed. And for about a year I didn't write a lick of music.

I just listened. You never saw me without a bag of records, my satchel. And I just listened and listened and just fell in love with those artists. And at the end of that year, I went, okay, I got it.

one of the things in common with all of these artists that I'm listening to, all of these great voices, these great singers, they all play an instrument. I've got to play an instrument. I've got to figure out something. And so So I was still working in that studio and I thought, right, I'll pick up the guitar. But I didn't own a guitar. So what I used to do is I used to play

whatever guitars were lying around the studio so if they'd been a band in the night before, I'd pick up their guitar, which is why I play upside down because I couldn't go restringing people's guitars. I'm left handed, so I learn upside down. And then someone saw me messing around trying to figure things out. And they went, okay, look, before you sort of get into like multiple chords.

There are two shapes that if you know these shapes, the A shape and the E shape, if you move those shapes up and down the fretboard, those are the two basic shapes that you can use to write any song. So as soon as they show me those two shapes, I went

🎵 Music

That was

A

I don't know, 45 minutes. I'd written them. I was thinking of all the things that had happened in I think it was 1990 or 89. In that period. It was a very profound period because I remember the Berlin Moor came down. Gorbachev was the first man from the Eastern Bloc to go and have sanctions with the Pope. There was this discovery or at least talk of fractals. and how they played a massive part in our culture. And I remember just with those

record writing about those things and realizing that the world was changing and I just thought, oh, we're never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy. Like I felt that we were on the brink of a big paradigm shift. And so I went over to Sigsworth's house. I really like the bass line to white lines. The man decides after 70 years, the body goes at four. I said, okay, the bass line goes like this, right? And then I said, the drum pine goes, do, do, do.

And I said the hi hat goes And then what you do Sigsworth, right? Is that you gate, you have a B3, a Hammond organ, right? These are things that I picked up from dance music. We used to use gates a lot in dance music, you know, with MIDI and things, you just gate things.

So I said what you do is you have a B3 going E G A right in the verse, just holding these sustained chords, but then you have the hi-hat going t- t. and you gate it to the hi-hat and that's how you got the it's the hi-hat that's actually doing that.

B

Uh-huh.

A

the keyboard players just holding sustained cause and you know that was it. I'd heard the whole thing in my head and knew how it should sound.

🎵 Music

Finding Your Voice: Songwriting Philosophy

A

I remember the next day taking that demo in and playing it to the guy who owned the studio who ended up becoming my first manager. What happened is when I played it to him, I wasn't really interested in what he said to me. I knew I'd written one. If they don't like it, they don't really want to hurt your feelings. So don't listen to what people say. Look at the effect.

that your music is having on them when you play it to them. Then you'll have your answer. And I played him that song. And at the end of it, he looked up at me and he went, yeah, that's the one. And it's a very different feeling in your development as a songwriter. You struggle, you struggle. All the songs I'd written before, they just weren't very good. They were lacking in identity, they were lacking in direction. They sounded like somebody else. Crazy was the first time.

I'd written a song and played it someone that sounded like me. And that came from picking up an instrument and taking the onus away from the voice. And actually using the instrument to establish your identity, the way that you play it, the choice of chords that you use, the way you play those chords, the syncopation. I got more of me in it.

C

So are these approaches that you've described representative of how you you still write songs today?

A

Yes, I do approach songwriting like that. Right now, for example, I am writing, I guess, what could be considered as an album. And I've done loads and loads of tracks over the last few years, loads of demos, some finished, some half finished, some quarter finished. And what I have now done. is I've gone back and listened to all of those ideas and gone, oh, yeah, I like that. Mm, don't like that so much. Oh yeah, that still kind of withstands the test of time.

And I've a bunch of sessions where I've stripped everything away. except for either a guitar or a piano and a vocal. And my approach is I have to be able to make that work. from beginning to end with no other elements. So that if you say to me, Sil, you've been writing an album, I go, yeah. And you go, oh, can I hear it?

If I can't pick up a guitar and sing it to you, then there's a fundamental problem. I can't be saying to you, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know what, it's gonna have this bit in it and that's you know, that's production. Songs, songs, songs. Like ideas come and go, but songs last forever. Yeah. Look at someone like Ed Sheeran, right? He could fill Wembley Stadium three nights in a row with a guitar. You ever ask yourself, like, how is it he can do that? It's because he writes really good songs.

All the other stuff comes and goes. Those are the variables. you know, the genre, oh the beats, you know, the fashion at the time, you know, what kids are into at the time, the delivery method, is it cassettes, is it C D, is it all that stuff comes and goes. Those are the variables, the constants. There are only two of them, song, vocal. They never change. They never change. That's why Adele could bring out an album, right? And it sells 36 million records.

Why?

A

'Cause they're great songs and she sings them really well.

C

You're not wrong.

B

Just gonna say that's a a great sentiment to finish on, Seal. Thanks so much for uh talking through your process and telling us about all those great songs.

A

Thank you. Thank you very much for listening. This songwriting process, it's a funny journey. Just when you think that you figured out, you know, the methods, the structure, oh how you do it, how you approach it. It just throws you a curveball. It's the only thing that I've done that is like that. It's never quite as it seems. You can figure out.

Certain things to do, you know, certain situations that you can put yourself in and prepare yourself for those songs to come through. But it's never quite how you think it's gonna be. They always come in a very unusual way. And I think that again, in addition to the collaborative aspect,

That's the thing that still has me passionate about making music. And it's the, you know, one of the major reasons why I still do it is because, you know, it just doesn't get old. It's this wonderful thing that just It's magic, so alchemy.

C

Yeah. Well we've been doing this podcast for a long time, interviewed a lot of songwriters and and we're still hearing, you know, variations on how people do things and this is after doing nearly two hundred and fifty interviews. So yeah, there's always that indefinable magic, isn't there?

A

It's magic. It really is, you know, and and it's always there. Even when you think it's not, even when you lose faith, if you're just patient and you're just open, it never ceases to amaze me, like how there can be nothing. And five minutes later, there's this thing that's just come from nowhere. That's the alchemy of music. I don't understand how that works. I just understand enough to know that I shouldn't really question it. It just is. That's just.

🎵 Music

Hosts' Final Reflections

B

That was Seal talking to us about the deluxe reissue of his eponymous debut.

C

So nice to get the backstory on so many of the hits there, wasn't it?

B

Yeah, not just from the first album, but from throughout his career.

C

He's certainly responsible for more than his fair share of great songs, isn't he?

A

Yeah.

C

And uh he gave a lot of credit to our former guest Trevor Horn there too.

B

Yeah, that was nice to hear, wasn't it? And obviously Trevor heard something in Kiss from a Rose that perhaps even Seal didn't hear at first.

C

Yeah, I mean sometimes songwriters can get too close to their creations, I guess, and and maybe stop seeing the wood for the trees, so to speak.

B

Yeah, so it's important to have someone around, isn't it, with more objectivity. Someone who's going to be able to identify the value in a song from afar, maybe.

C

Definitely, yeah, and uh and certainly that collaboration with Trevor has been a a major force in his career, hasn't it?

B

Yeah, he he really loves him, doesn't he? And um I guess we should all be so lucky to find a champion like that. With ears that good.

C

We ready short. So thanks to Seal for the chat. The deluxe edition of his self titled debut is out now, so go check that out. And thanks also to Julian for setting it up.

B

We'll be back soon to see out the year with a couple more killer apps.

🎵 Music

B

Until then, pick it up.

🎵 Music

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