ANAHEIM, Calif. — As Tears for Fears toured behind its 2022 album “The Tipping Point,” singer-bassist Curt Smith says he and his longtime musical partner Roland Orzabal started thinking about documenting these shows that they considered among the best performances the group has ever done.

“The live show after ‘The Tipping Point’ for us kind of changed things a lot,” Smith says on a recent call from his home in Los Angeles. “Suddenly, it was all fresh and interesting. And we loved the songs from ‘The Tipping Point,’ introducing them in the set.

“They sounded so good with the other songs,” he says. “I think they stand up to our old material.

“We just thought it was such a good tour, and sounding so good,” Smith says. “The initial idea was the film. Then it seemed obvious, because we had the recording, because we were mixing it for the film, to do the album.”

“Tears for Fears Live (A Tipping Point Film)” had special screenings in movie theaters at the end of October. The live album “Songs for a Nervous Planet,” arrived on Oct. 25.

The group considers “Songs for a Nervous Planet” its first official live album, but to Smith and singer-guitarist Orzabal, four new songs that open the record are equally important to the live tracks.

“The record company, they normally want you to do a bonus track or two,” Smith says. “But they tend to kind of be throwaways. Normally, they’re just as a selling point.

“We didn’t feel comfortable doing that,” he says. “We ended up going back in the studio in January. Two of the tracks we had started before but hadn’t finished. Two of them are brand new. The general idea was we were going to put them first, because it’s, in a weird way, the most important bit of it.

“I know everyone else wants to hear the live album, and we’re very happy with it,” Smith says. “But the four new songs are first, and kind of for us, it’s an EP with 18 bonus live tracks.”

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Smith talked about why he thinks Tears for Fears is a better live band today than ever before, writing and recording the four new songs, why “The Tipping Point” arrived 18 years after the previous studio album, and more.

Q: Let’s talk about the new songs for the live album. ‘The Girl That I Call Home’ is a song Roland had worked on in the past?

A: He’d been working on it for a while and had the verse but couldn’t find a chorus. Then suddenly the melody hit him. He felt like he had a good chorus but not a good song title. In his own words, he sort of went to bed and, you know, prayed to the gods, and he woke up the next day and ‘The Girl That I Call Home’ came out, which seemed like the perfect title.

Q: The other older song was ‘Astronaut’?

A: That one just didn’t fit in with ‘The Tipping Point.’ ‘The Tipping Point’ definitely had a theme running through it, and when you’re putting an album together you need that. And we didn’t feel that ‘Astronaut’ fit in thematically, but even musically. It’s a very open, airy track, yet we did love the song.

We came back to do it, and recorded a whole bunch of simple things, putting on a real Fender Rhodes (piano) as opposed to a Fender Rhodes sample made the whole thing come to life. Actually, now it is to us the most important of the four tracks. It’s really the theme.

Q: How would you describe that theme?

A: I mean, ‘Astronaut’ itself is really more about a feeling of being lost and that feeling of alienation. But also it’s very childlike. It’s sort of about dreaming of bigger things. But it has many levels, if you look at it, of escapism, dreaming of bigger things, us not being as important as we think we are. All those things. You know, once you get out and look at world, we’re just tiny little specks.

Q: ‘Say Goodbye to Mom and Dad’ is about the lockdown, and people dying. You and Roland have described it as a very sad song with happy music. Tell me about that.

A: It’s what we do naturally. I mean, it’s what we’ve done throughout the years. If you look at songs like ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ or ‘Mad World’ or any of them. ‘Pale Shelter' even, or ‘Shout.’ They’re all kind of upbeat musically and get you singing along, yet the lyrics, if you take them out of the song, are very dark.

If you listen to Gary Jules and Michael Andrews version of ‘Mad World,’ or even Lorde’s version of ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ she did for ‘Hunger Games,’ the production is far more in line with the lyrics. The production is very dark. But we tend to couch what are very serious, dark lyrics in these kind of effectively pop songs.

Q: ‘The Tipping Point’ was Tears for Fears’ first album in many, many years. Why was it that long between records?

A: Well, I think there were many reasons. One, we were bringing up our kids, to be honest. So being away from home for long periods of time was not an option for us. Up until my kids were 18 – they’re now 25 and 22 – I had never spent more than two weeks away from them in my life. I had an absent father. I didn’t want to be that.

And we just didn’t feel the need. We were sort of touring in the summer and enjoying playing together. Then, one, our management thought we should make another record, and two, we felt after playing live for a bunch of years that it was getting a little stale. We needed to refresh it.

Q: I’ve read that even after you started it went slowly.

A: You’ve got to find out what your sort of theme is, or what the subject matter is. We went through, at our manager’s behest, all these horrendous writing sessions with the songwriters du jour. That all went, primarily, horribly wrong apart from a couple of things. Because it wasn’t us. It was us trying to be something else. We were signed to Warner Brothers and we ended up with this album of 12 attempts at singles, at modern singles, that didn’t sound like Tears for Fears.

So we bought the album off Warner Brothers so they wouldn’t release it. We parted ways with our manager. During this time, Roland’s wife passed away. COVID happened. And we’re like, ‘If we don’t have (stuff) to write about now, we never will.’

We were left alone, just me and Roland. We had no management, we had no record label. We said, ‘Look, let’s do the album the way we did “The Hurting” [their 1983 debut]. Let’s do it ourselves. Let’s go write at my house, get the acoustic guitars out, and see what happens.’

And it was really easy, once we got going. It really didn’t take that long to make. The process was like seven years, eight years maybe. The actual recording of ‘The Tipping Point’ itself, probably four months.

Q: That’s quite a gestation.

A: Yeah, but you know, it’s one of those things. We’re fussy bastards. We’re not, I wouldn’t claim to be a perfectionist because we’ve never reached perfection yet, which is why we keep trying. But we do have that desire, and if it’s not good to us, if we don’t feel it, we won’t do it.

This was something we both felt incredibly strong about, and the album, when we finished it, when we sequenced it, put it together, we looked at each other and thought, ‘This is really good.’ For us both to be happy takes a bit.

Q: Where did you write it? You’ve lived in Los Angeles for sometime now haven’t you?

A: I’ve lived in America for over half my life now. I lived in New York for 10 years, now 27 years in L.A.

Q: And is Roland also out here?

A: He has a house here. He had a house when we did [the previous album] ‘Everybody Loves a Happy Ending’ back in 2004, when we were recording that. So we do all our recording here. He comes back and forth. He’s now sold his house in England, so he’s going to be based in America. Probably more based in Colorado where his now-wife is from. But back and forth from there to L.A. is easy, obviously.

Q: When you look back on the career you and Roland have had as Tears for Fears, and the early success you had, what stands out to you? That had to make your head spin a little, I would think.

A: To be honest, it messes you up a bit. Because you’re just too young to really be able to take it in, and not experienced enough to say, ‘No,’ which is obviously something we’ve learned very well how to do over the years. So it was difficult. The whole fame thing was very difficult, and certainly by ‘Sowing the Seeds of Love,’ I had had enough. My first marriage was falling apart. Me and Roland were disagreeing on stuff.

When you’re looking back on it, it all makes sense. We were in that sort of mid-20s time, and it’s that time you’re trying to find your individuality. And being a member of a band, especially two people together, we were already those guys from Tears for Fears. There was no individual identity. So it was important for us to find that.

For me, I felt, if I stuck around doing that at that time, it might kill me, certainly emotionally. I was lucky enough I met my now-wife — we’ve been together now 38 years — in New York. At the end of the ‘Seeds of Love’ Tour, I decided to take a hiatus and move to New York and kind of disappear. The best thing I ever did and the healthiest thing I ever did.

Q: What’s next for you and Roland and Tears for Fears?

A: We both feel that we’re kind of on a roll. For whatever reason, we’ve become bigger now than we have been in a long time. I mean, just on ‘The Tipping Point’ tour, we never played Madison Square Garden before, let alone sold it out. We never played the Hollywood Bowl before. Anytime we play people definitely connect with it. There’s no question.

‘The Tipping Point’ was for us, was for our benefit. Luckily, people love it. I don’t think we ever really knew how well it would do, we just knew it was good, which is all you can do when you go into a studio. First week out, we were in England, doing press at the time, and it went Top 5 everywhere worldwide. And suddenly, like, ‘Whoa, OK, I guess we’re current again.’

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