These days, when I find myself burnt out on most music in general, I tend to get re-acquainted with a band I haven’t listened to in years and then get really obsessive and listen to pretty much nothing but that band for weeks.

The latest is Tears for Fears. While I was out on my big road trip, I picked up this new 20th anniversary edition of “Songs from the Big Chair.” It’s a double-disc collection that includes the original album, all the b-sides, the 7″ singles and the 12″ remixes.

“Songs from the Big Chair” was one of the first tapes I ever owned as a kid. I had a mullet in 3rd grade because I wanted to be like Tears for Fears (Roland Orzabal had the closest thing to a mullet, and it wasn’t really, but it was apparently the best I could do in terms of hero emulation). I have an extremely vivid memory of visiting my cousins in Columbia, Missouri in ’85 or ’86 and watching in awe as a bunch of their neighborhood friends climbed into a tree and sang “Shout” as if it were some sort of tribal ceremony. My aunt and uncle, who had MTV, taped the top 100 videos of 1985 for us, as we had no cable out in the country, and I watched that over and over for about the next 5 years. The highlights were always “Shout,” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and “Head Over Heels.”

In the time that had passed and the world switched to CDs, I’d picked up that “Tears Roll Down” best-of collection before Curt Smith left the group. By the time 1993 rolled around and KKNB became 104.1 The Planet, I learned that the music I liked then and back in the 80s had a name: alternative.

Alternative radio meant there was going to be a place to hear the singles from the next two albums, like “Break It Down Again” and “God’s Mistake.” So I added “Elemental” and “Raoul and the Kings of Spain” to the collection. And then in the last 10 years, I would occasionally pull out “Tears Roll Down” and that was pretty much it.

So listening to “Songs from the Big Chair” reignited that fascination with Tears for Fears music. I dug out “Elemental” and “Raoul.” I searched for weeks for a copy of “The Hurting,” and then found the ’99 re-issue with bonus tracks used at an outlet store at the Lake of the Ozarks. I picked up the 2004 comeback album. Now, other than that b-sides collection from a few years ago, the collection is complete, and it’s so much fun to listen to.

Oh, and just the other day I found “Scenes from the Big Chair,” the documentary that accompanied “Songs from the Big Chair.”

There really is no other point to this post other than to geek out over some of my favorite music. Maybe there is a little bit of satisfaction in still being impressed by some of the first music I was ever attracted to, in a completely non-ironic, unsentimental way.

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