"Mad World" is a song by the British band Tears for Fears. Written by Roland Orzabal and sung by bassist Curt Smith, it was the band's third single release and first chart hit, reaching #3 on the UK Singles Chart in November 1982. Both "Mad World" and its B-side, "Ideas as Opiates", would turn up on the band's debut LP The Hurting the following year. The song would eventually become Tears for Fears' first international hit, reaching the Top 40 in several countries between 1982 and 1983.
Two decades later, the song made a popular resurgence when it was covered in a much slower, minimalist style by composers Michael Andrews and Gary Jules for the soundtrack to the movie Donnie Darko in 2001, and then again in the hit 2006 video game Gears of War. This version reached #1 in the UK in December 2003, and also became an international hit.
Read more about Mad World: Background, Meanings, Song Versions, B-side, Music Video, Track Listings, Chart Positions, Michael Andrews and Gary Jules Version, Other Versions and Covers
Famous quotes containing the words mad and/or world:
“[T]he most artful method [of courtship] would be this, to tell her that what she doth not possess is useless and contemptible, that weakness and imperfection is the perfection of a woman, that I am stark mad in love with ignorance; and thus shall I allure her by calling her [a] fool.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one’s position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)