AUGUST 19, 2026

By Devon Ivie

Photo: Ilpo Musto/Shutterstock

Roland Orzabal didn’t set out to write a standard musician’s memoir. “Live Aid was a little bit boring,” he tells me, as if to further hammer this nonchalance across. “It’s such a banal story that I didn’t feel like including it.” However, when you’re one-half of the band that perhaps best defined the soundscape of the 1980s, you’re going to have to make a few concessions. The resulting book, Welcome to Your Life: Love, Death, and Tears for Fears, is a hybrid of his history with bandmate Curt Smith juxtaposed against lessons in astrology, which intertwine into what Orzabal believes is the complete picture of who he is. “It’s more important that I get all that stuff in with the commentary of how the planets correlate with the movements, ups and downs, triumphs, and tragedies of my life,” he explains. “As opposed to writing everything about Tears for Fears.” For every deviation about the cosmos, though, you’ll be rewarded with studio tales behind the band’s biggest hits — do we have to “Shout” its name? — or anecdotes about Orzabal’s peers. Say, Peter Gabriel’s variable tennis skills. “God bless him, he’s not very coordinated from the waist down,” he says. “He’s got a beautiful serve. But when it comes to running for the ball, that proves a little trickier.”

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