If you’re not watching Game Changers on Dropout, you should start. I admit I was skeptical when the clips from that series and its spin-off Make Some Noise kept popping up on YouTube and Instagram: I didn’t think the material was all that funny, but I did love how the cast all so enthusiastically supported each other. That seems to be an overriding ethos of the channel and all of its series. Everybody’s just kind to each other, and it’s so refreshing to see. But Game Changers has come into its own the past couple of seasons, with some genuinely brilliant concepts.
Anyway, the most recent episode featured “Kiss from a Rose” by Seal, for reasons I won’t spoil. It was the first time I’d heard the song in a long time, and it got immediately stuck in my head. I’d never thought much about it in the early 90s when it was released, beyond “hella corny” and “Batman” and “that hot dude singing with his shirt open.” Very rarely, I’ll launch into “my power, my pleasure, my pain!” if I hear it playing in a grocery store or something. But I’ve just thought of it as maudlin, forgettable, early 90’s pop.
But here’s the thing: it’s actually a good song! It’s a perfect showcase for Seal’s vocal range, and whether or not the lyrics actually mean anything, the phrasing is pretty interesting. “The more I get of you, the stranger it feels” doesn’t scan with the rest of the chorus, so it feels like a period at the end of a sentence instead of a melody repeating. It’s given me a renewed appreciation for a song I’d always dismissed.
Another ubiquitous Seal song from the early 1990s that I haven’t thought much about: “Crazy.” I admit I haven’t been as won over by this as much as I was “Kiss from a Rose.” But only hearing it on the radio and public PA systems without ever buying the album, I never knew that it was produced by Trevor Horn.
Listening to it now, it’s kind of obvious — I can’t tell if the sound is so closely associated with the late 80s/early 90s because “Crazy” played all of the time, or because Horn defined so much of what I think of as the sound of that time. I know of his music mainly through Art of Noise and “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes, but he seemed to have a hand in absolutely everything. I should go through and compile a Trevor Horn-produced playlist at some point.
(Incidentally: on the deluxe version of Seal II, which contains “Kiss from a Rose,” Seal does a cover of “Manic Depression” with Jeff Beck, and it’s pretty solid).