Mothers Talk

"Mothers Talk" is a 1984 song by the British band Tears for Fears. Written by Roland Orzabal and Ian Stanley and sung by Orzabal, it was the band's seventh single release (the first to be taken from their second album Songs from the Big Chair and fifth UK Top 40 chart hit. The song was released six months in advance of the album, and enjoyed moderate success internationally.

Orzabal notes that while "Mothers Talk" helped move the band in a new creative direction, he does not like the track. Producer Chris Hughes considers it important to the band's development, although he and engineer Dave Bascombe agree that the song is not one of Orzabal's best.

“This was a taster for Songs from the Big Chair, the second album, on which we unashamedly tried to become more commercial. I was against it, but I was swayed by some of the people that I was working with. They wanted to come out all guns blazing, but I wasn't ready for that. It was from this point, though, that things really started to explode.“

— Roland Orzabal

"Mothers Talk" was written in 1983 and was first publicly performed during the band's late 1983 tour. Orzabal describes it as an unsuccessful attempt to mimic the sound of Talking Heads. In early 1984, the band went into the studio to record the song as their next single, though the recording sessions with their new producer Jeremy Green did not work out as planned and the recording was scrapped. The band's previous producer, Chris Hughes, was then brought back into the fold and the song was re-recorded and finally released as a single in August 1984. Hughes stayed on with the band to record their second album, Songs from the Big Chair.

Along with its B-side, "Empire Building", "Mothers Talk" was one of the first Tears for Fears songs to demonstrate a creative use of sampling. The strings at the beginning of the song were culled from a Barry Manilow record, while the drum sample around which "Empire Building" is built was lifted from the Simple Minds song "Today I Died Again". This was the second Tears for Fears single for which Phonogram Records would use the picture disc and coloured vinyl gimmicks as a promotional tool, as well as the first one to feature multiple 12" releases offering different remixes of the track. Limited quantities of the 7" single also came with a free Tears For Fears window sticker of the band's new logo.

“The song stems from two ideas. One is something that mothers say to their children about pulling faces. They say the child will stay like that when the wind changes. The other idea is inspired by the anti-nuclear cartoon book When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs.“

— Roland Orzabal

While America saw "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" as the first single release from the Songs from the Big Chair LP, "Mothers Talk" was eventually released there as the fourth and final single from the album in April 1986, peaking at no. 27 on the Billboard Hot 100. Although labeled as a "remix", this version of the song is actually a complete re-recording, done by the band after their Big Chair tour wrapped up. It was mixed by the award-winning producer Bob Clearmountain, who would go on to mix the band's next album with them. In addition to a different picture sleeve, the single featured the band's cover of Robert Wyatt's "Sea Song" as the B-side (this had been released as the B-side to the single "I Believe" in other countries in 1985). This version was also released in Canada and Japan at the same time.