MAD WORLD

From the website Songfacts ….

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This song is about a depressed young person who feels out of place in this world. He sees life as being empty, and looks for ways to escape the pain. The line, “The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had” suggests thoughts of suicide, but according to Roland Orzabal, who wrote the lyrics, it relates to the psychologist Arthur Janov’s idea that our most dramatic dreams release the most tension.

So, the guy in the song isn’t necessarily looking to die – he wakes up from morbid, lucid dreams feeling better.

Roland Orzabal came up with this song when he was living in an apartment in Bath, England, with his girlfriend, Caroline, who later became his wife. She was working three jobs so he could work on his music (a keeper, for sure!). Orzabal spent a lot of time strumming his acoustic guitar while staring out the window, watching people go about their business. “It’s a bizarre viewpoint to watch people go about their daily routine, having to work for a living when you’re sitting in a flat, unemployed,” he told Top 2000 a gogo. “That’s where it came from.”

This was written by Roland Orzabal but sung by the group’s other vocalist, Curt Smith, who connected with the tune right way. He explained it “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. My father always worked away, and died when I was 17, but I hated him by that point. It hit me later in life, but back then I was teenage and angry. The song was the perfect platform. It worked better with my voice because it’s more melancholic, darker.”

Orzabal, then 19 years old, wrote the song on an acoustic guitar after hearing Duran Duran’s “Girls On Film.” He explained: “I just thought: ‘I’m going to have a crack at something like that.’ I did and ended up with ‘Mad World.’ It sounded pretty awful on guitar, though, with just me singing.

However, we were fortunate enough to be given an opportunity by a guy called Ian Stanley to go to his very big house and muck about on his synthesizer. Ian became our keyboard player and he had a drum machine, too. All we needed was someone who knew how to work it. Eventually, we made the first demo of ‘Mad World’ still with me singing. But I didn’t like it. So I said to Curt: ‘Look, you sing it.’ And suddenly it sounded fabulous.”

This was Tears For Fears’ first hit in their native UK, where they soon became a top act of the ’80s. In America, “Mad World” went nowhere, but two songs from their next album, “Shout” and “Everybody Wants To Rule The World,” went to #1. “Mad World” gradually came to the attention of American listeners, but very few of them knew about it when it was first released