An Opening of the heart?
I sensed an opening existed in a musician’s heart to faith that when I got to page 181 and saw it in his own writing. I know there has been a ~great~ resistance to faith in Jesus, and my sense is even from deep disappointment in the Jesus of the Church he experience even from childhood. Hey! I’ve been there. I know it can happen, it happened to me. I also know when I see in the core there was a seed planted and it is a heart cry for the real Jesus to answer. Again that happened to me. I don’t think I’m projecting my experience on to Roland based on what he has written in this autobiography.
You know the story that Tucker Carlson told about the demon attacking him in his sleep, leaving bite marks? Ever since that happened Tucker has walked in an increasingly evil spirit of hatred of the Jewish people and Israel. It is so dishonest, that it makes a mockery of Tucker’s own intellect and knowledge base as a journalist. I do believe Tucker became demonized that day – and he seems to embrace it. It is something he is willing to walk in, to be an influencer of evil. . .for wealth. Maybe he will break free, maybe he will sell his soul for the wealth that was laid at his feet to become false media ‘prophet’.
In reading Roland’s autobiography I found he had a similar yet different experience to Tucker’s. One night as he crawled into bed alone while shooting a video in Spain, Roland had a spiritual encounter. Only this was not a biting, attack demon like Tucker experienced, and Roland didn’t have to ask anyone else what it was! He knew instantly not to embrace that thing.
An Opening of the Heart continues
He felt invisible arms wrap around his waist that he knew at once were malevolent and sexual. He screamed, “I love Jesus! I love Jesus! The arms released him.
When he did that, Roland got down to his core belief. The one thing he has tried to deny his whole life reversed instinctually confronted with an evil spiritual entity. His cry was to for Jesus.
The autobiography I’m reading is not about a dark human being. It is about a person who against the odds of what I believe is a generational familial curse tied to the biblically forbidden dark arts. Somewhere in his life there was a seed of faith in the name of the Lord that still remains.
I just want to say here that even though I am being open about how Tears for Fears and especially Roland Orzabal’s lyrics, in no way is this meant to be a public pressuring of Roland. By deep diving into their music, history, interviews and the autobiography, it has led me into becoming more compassionate toward music artists and awakened to our need to graciously welcome them when they come to faith.
If there is any truth about God I would like to emphasis here it is that God gives each and every person a free will choice regarding the salvation in Jesus and their own lives. If anyone is coerced as happened so frequently in Church history, it is not faith. It is not real if anyone has to be pressured into the decision.
I just don’t know how I could explain the leading I began to follow September 14th when I heard the clip of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” without laying out what I’ve experienced since then. I am praying for God to show me even how to pray for someone I don’t even know and so far out of my own circle. I don’t know how, but God does.
I know there are people who cannot wrap their heads around the spiritual reality of the invisible spirit world where demonic spirits can attack and even inhabit people. But for spiritual people, you better realize that we are going to continue to see an increase of spirits not even bothered to hide themselves. We better know and use the spiritual authority we have in commanding them to free their victims!
Why Roland?
Why Roland? Because he is the main songwriter, the one who wrote most of the lyrics and composed most of the songs. Those lyrics are compelling to me because that is how I write too with an internal drive to express the real thoughts and emotions inside.
Last night I returned to look at the songs on Tears for Fears album in 2022. It had been 18 years between albums: The 2004 album was a reunion album Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, for Curt and Roland’s reconciliation after 10 years of not speaking. These school boy mates.
The conflict between them has been spoken of. For Curt, the “face” of Tears for Fears, he could not have a life because everywhere he went he was recognized and mobbed. For Roland, he was the musical genius back in the studio resentful that he did not get the credit he was due.
His drive for perfection for the music (and from himself to create it perfectly) drove everyone in the studio a bit crazy…especially his best friend Curt. They ended the relationship on such hard terms they didn’t speak to each other for the next ten years. And when they finally had to make contact over contractual necessity, the hard feelings within them began to dissolve. They reconciled.
The 18 years between that reconciliation album and the 2022 album, Roland had experienced another devastating loss of his childhood sweetheart, his wife who died the slow and agonizing death of cirrhosis, and the dementia that came with it. He was her caretaker.
So the 2022 The Tipping Point album was full of the emotions of Roland’s journey through that. After his wife’s death in 2017, the horrible details he left out of his autobiography for the dignity of her memory and for their two sons, Roland was driven into his own despair of life. He was overwhelmed with shame that he had begun to fall in love with the woman who would become his second wife, even before his first wife had died.
After his wife’s death Roland had four hospitalizations in one year: out of control wine consumption, addiction to Ambien and considering taking his own life.
I have little doubt that the Accuser that speaks to our minds disguised as our own thoughts, was giving him hell about his wife’s death. If you have ever been close to someone drinking or drugging themselves to death, then you know the emotional battlefield it is. Roland fortunately pulled out of aftermath of his wife’s death and continued to walk out his life.
All those emotions are in the songs of The Tipping Point. It is an album that is literally crying out to God in songs like “Rivers of Mercy”, “My Demons”, “Break the Man”, “Master Plan” — all of them really. I hope his inner cry does bring the real God to him.
Five years into Roland’s second marriage, he and Emily, had a daughter in 2025 who is a ray of sunshine to him. As he said in an interview with Adam Corolla about taking his one month old daughter in his arms to nestle on his chest to sleep: “I’m not a religious person, per se, but that’s God! That’s what God feels like, it’s an incredible feeling. This light! Even though she is just a month old, the chemistry that’s coming from her heart to my heart is absolutely stunning.”
I empathize with people who suffer from all the problems that life can bring us. I cry along with those characters in movies, in stories. It doesn’t matter if I have zero experience in why they are in sorrow and pain. I know what pain and sorrow are, so I can be touched by what their pains and sorrows are without knowing the same pain from personal experience.
Roland is different to me in that respect. Looking at his lyrics, what he says in interviews about his life, hits me because I know personally about so many of the same sorrows and pains. Not all the circumstances are the same, but enough that it feels like looking at him is for me at least like looking in a mirror emotionally.
I do hope Roland has a heart opening to God. At long last he will know the peace of having the balm of healing poured into his wounds. It is a peace that bypasses our ability to understand. Who can explain great a peace? Not me, except to say that no matter what is happening in life, I do know God sees it and it will work out for my good. He will see to that.
Roland’s own lyrics tell a story of emotional pain that I know only God can heal. Roland may not reveal every single pain and sorrow of the heart, but he is courageous in withholding little.
I don’t even know if he could receive the witness of the Lord that I could give. We don’t run in the same circles. (God, send him those he can hear!).
For one thing he would probably hate my politics. . .maybe I would be a “political granny” to him. Who knows. Curt expressed his political thinking in talking about their last album Songs for a Nervous Planet in 2024. Both are living in the US now, Curt for many years and his leanings are to BLM, Me Too, the usual liberal musician positions. If they don’t express those views maybe they have more traditional views than the bubble music colleagues who seemingly aligned with peer-oriented to views and causes.
Holding those views do not make them immune to a need for God to breakthrough in their lives with the healing, peace and restoration of soundness and wholeness, however and that has had me rethink all the young people right now in America too. Many are suffering from mental illness in things they have been encouraged to believe. They make us angry, but compassion is what they really need to be set free.
Roland is now in my prayers for God to intervene and for Jesus to reveal Himself to him. Again, this is not meant to be a pressure to him personally. Free will choice is the only kosher option. In fact, he represents many more musicians and other creatives who I envision coming to God in the season ahead. We need to soften our hearts toward them now.
* Taking every thought captive, 2 Corinthians 10:5