Seal on the George Clooney connection to 'Kiss From a Rose' and why singing it is a 'minefield'
LOS ANGELES — Dressed in a baggy green flight suit, his fingernails painted black, Seal squared himself behind a microphone in a Van Nuys rehearsal studio and bobbed his signature bald head as his five-person band wound its way through the intro of his song "Fast Changes."
The airy, intricately rhythmic folk-soul tune is hardly the best known track from Seal's self-titled 1994 LP, which sold 4 million copies in the U.S., earned a Grammy nomination for album of the year and spun off the Hot 100-topping "Kiss From a Rose." But on a recent afternoon the 60-year-old British singer was prepping for a tour meant to commemorate the three decades since he broke out with his 1991 debut (also titled "Seal") and its smash follow-up.
Thus the deep cut.
To listen back to Seal's first two albums, both of which he made with producer Trevor Horn, is of course to marvel at the rough-cut beauty of his voice, with its stylish rasp and its promise of a lover's tender care. Yet the records also make a prescient argument about the porousness of genre lines as they move among throbbing dance music ("Crazy"), bluesy acoustic rock ("Whirlpool"), luxurious torch-song balladry ("Don't Cry") and trippy gospel-funk ("Future Love Paradise").
For the tour, Seal reteamed with Horn, 73, who's serving as the singer's musical director
