Seal: ‘I’ve Done Things I Could Have Only Dreamed About’
Seal has spoken about his early years, coping with celebrity and the joy he continues to find in making music in a new interview with The Guardian ahead of his UK tour.
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“No one wants to hear me singing about the woes of the world or about how depressed I have been,” the singer reflected. “It has to circle back to love. It is at the centre of everything I do… “When I perform, I sing to remind people to connect with each other because I have a lot of faith in us as a species. I think we do some pretty screwed-up things, but at our core we are of love and that is the purpose of life. The fact that I can sing and have that love reciprocated is extremely rare. I do for a living something that, in essence, is who I am.”
Seal went on to look back at his previous work, “Whenever I think back on all the records that I have made, the value has been in the process, not in the end result,” he says. “I don’t really care what happens to it afterwards because it is out of your hands. It is about the incredible moments where you are in a room with your favourite players and they do something that is magical, then you harness that energy for the record.
“I mainly just feel lucky that I was able to sing my way out of poverty and sing my way into people’s favour. The last 30 years of my life have been exceptional – I have done things I could have only dreamed about.”
With success came public scrutiny, “It was a pain in the arse,” he says. “I can’t stand the word celebrity because it has such a negative connotation of implying being famous for the sake of being famous. As far as I was concerned, I was always a musician and I have never considered myself a celebrity. I don’t need to look in OK! magazine to understand who I am. I am no longer in that circus.”
Seal upcoming tour dates
September
12 – LIVERPOOL Philharmonic
13 – SHEFFIELD City Hall
14 – WOLVERHAMPTON Halls
16 – MANCHESTER Opera House
17 – LONDON Palladium