![]() Joel Schumacher wanted a new Seal song for the Batman Forever soundtrack, but Seal was already working on his next album, and he have didn’t anything for Schumacher. When that single came out, it peaked at #16. ![]() The big single from the soundtrack was supposed to be “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me,” a pretty great U2 song written specifically for the movie. It’s got a Method Man song called “The Riddler.” That album is a wild ride. It’s got covers: the Offspring doing the Damned, Massive Attack and Everything But The Girl’s Tracey Thorn doing the Marvelettes, INXS’ Michael Hutchence doing Iggy Pop. The soundtrack has Nick Cave and Mazzy Star and the Flaming Lips and Sunny Day Real Estate. There’s a lot going on with the Batman Forever soundtrack album, which is probably the only compilation that’s ever put PJ Harvey right next to future Number Ones artist Brandy. (I wrote a whole AV Club column on Batman Forever a few years ago, so I’m not going to go on too long about why I think it sucks, but I really do think it sucks.) But Schumacher and his people did put together a weird and mostly good soundtrack album for Batman Forever. But Batman Forever was big and glittery and full of stars at their peaks - white-hot Jim Carrey as the Riddler, recent Oscar winner Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face - and it did huge business despite being probably even worse than Batman & Robin. Schumacher’s whole idea was to crank up all the campy, stylized aspects of Batman, and this impulse eventually led to 1997’s widely mocked, fantastically awful Batman & Robin, which temporarily killed the franchise before Christopher Nolan took it in a self-consciously different direction. In Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits, Seal says, “Trevor turned to me and said, ‘We’re silly if we don’t put this on it.'” She liked the song, and she told them that they should keep it. (It definitely is flowery, but in a good way.) But Seal and Horn were both friends with Lynne Franks, a fashion publicist. Years later, he told The Guardian that he thought the song “too flowery” to fit on the album. ![]() The George Clinton protege and J Dilla mentor Amp Fiddler plays keyboards, for instance, while future My Brightest Diamond member Chris Bruce plays guitar and future Fiona Apple sideman Charley Drayton plays bass.Īfter recording “Kiss From A Rose,” Seal still didn’t like the song, and he told Horn that it didn’t belong on the album. ![]() The recording is big and lush and grandiose, and it includes a fascinating array of session musicians. But once Horn heard “Kiss From A Rose,” he was into it, so he and Seal recorded the track. Before recording that album, Seal had never let Horn hear “Kiss From A Rose,” since he didn’t really like the song. In 1994, Seal released his Trevor Horn-produced sophomore album, which was also self-titled but which everyone called Seal II. He stayed in Thailand for another year, earning a meager income by singing with a blues band in an ex-pat bar. After the Japan shows, Push visited Bangkok, and Seal loved the city. He didn’t much like the result, and he later told Genius that he “threw the tape in a corner.” Soon afterward, Seal took a gig as the singer for a British funk band called Push, who’d already booked a few shows in Japan. For Seal, “Kiss From A Rose” was an experiment he wanted to see what he could do by layering his own voice. Seal couldn’t play any instruments then, so he did the whole thing a cappella. This was 1987, nearly a decade before the song reached #1. During that stretch of time, he wrote and recorded the first version of “Kiss From A Rose” on a four-track recorder. Seal didn’t think of himself as a musician, but a music teacher and a girlfriend both encouraged him after hearing him sing.Įventually, Seal started recording demos, but labels weren’t interested. When Seal was 17, his father died, and he moved into a squat, living there while studying architecture. Seal’s father was abusive, and his scars come from a rare version of lupus that he contracted as a young man. (When Seal was born, the #1 song in America was Paul & Paula’s “ Hey Paula.”) Seal spent part of his childhood with a foster family before being returned to his parents. Seal Henry Olusegun Olumide Adeola Samuel was born in London, the son of a Nigerian mother and a Brazilian father. Over his career, Seal has only notched one week atop the Hot 100, but that’s been enough to give him his own dreamlike presence in our cultural imagination. Seal’s trip to the top of the American charts was a long, complicated one. “Kiss From A Rose” is an unearthly song, and a big part of its strange, uncanny vibe is the particular gravitas of Seal himself, a man so beautiful that he makes intense facial scars look sexy. ![]()
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