LOS ANGELES — For Seal, songwriting is therapeutic. And since splitting from model-TV personality Heidi Klum in 2012, he has been immersed.
“It’s really cathartic,” he said.
“The caveat is it only works if you’re being honest,” he added. “It would be like if you were going to a shrink or a therapist, that only works if you’re telling the truth.”
The result is Seal’s first new music in five years, an album about love, heartbreak and healing.
The 52-year-old, whose birth name is Henry Samuel, said he didn’t set out to write about love; he just tried to be truthful.
“If you’re being in any way disingenuous, then it doesn’t matter if that thing comes out and it’s successful commercially. You’re forever tethered to that thing, and you don’t gain release,” he said. “And I think the whole point of being a songwriter is to gain release through those things you write.”
The new album has songs with titles such as “The Big Love Has Died” and lyrics such as “Breaking up is harder when you have a higher price to pay/ Now she takes a lover so that she can hide the pain.”
Seal and Klum were married for seven years before their divorce was finalized in 2014. They have three children together, and Seal adopted Klum’s daughter from a previous relationship. The children are 11, 10, 9 and 4.
“Over the past few years, Seal has been through the tumble dryer of love,” said producer Trevor Horn, who first worked with the singer on his 1991 debut. “He gets sad on the record. You can hear him being sad, but you can’t hear him being bitter.”
Seal wanted to call the new album “Seal,” but he said the record company was worried that fans would confuse it with his first, second and fourth albums, also called “Seal,” so they agreed to call it “Seal 7,” which hit stores Friday.
He’s halfway through making a follow-up album. It’s not about making hits, he said, but making connections, first with his own feelings, then with his listeners.
