Seal
‘Kiss From A Rose’
Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number 4 on July 30, 1995
1. There used to be a greying tower
“When I was a kid and this song came out, my sister told me an elaborate story of how it was about the death of Seal’s wife. She said that they had been driving on a snowing night and got into a terrible car accident. The wife died. Seal survived but that’s why he has those scars on his face. I genuinely believed it was a true story until I told this to someone else in a bar like 20 years after the song came out and they laughed in my face…”
— From a Reddit thread of fan theories about the meaning of ‘Kiss From A Rose’
The mid-90s saw a number of mainstream hits that sampled music from the edges of living memory. ‘Doop’ by Doop brought The Charleston into the Top 40; Lou Bega carried Mambo into the new century; and Scatman John introduced children to scat (and to the necessity of turning on Safe Search before you google unfamiliar words.)
But nobody travelled in time as far as Seal, who went back centuries for the opening hook of ‘Kiss From A Rose’. The song opens with a harpsichord playing a melody in 3/4 time, a sound that briefly evokes images of Elizabethan England, a striking way to open what could have been a standard pop ballad.
That should be the most notable thing about ‘Kiss From A Rose’, yet somehow it isn’t. When people talk about the song even now, they mostly focus on cryptic lyrics, so vivid and just slightly beyond understanding, like the feeling of waking up from a dream. The tower, the rose, the snow… what does it all mean? Is it about love? Sex? Drugs? Is it a painful story from Seal’s past told in metaphors? Is it about Batman?
What makes it more beguiling is the fact that nobody even knows what the lyrics are. He’s probably singing “kiss from a rose on the grey”. He could be singing “kiss from a rose on the grave”. There’s no official lyric sheet to confirm it either way, and Seal refuses to clarify.
If there’s any hope of finding a definitive answer, we need to go right back to the start.
2. The light on the dark side of me
“I always thought it’s about him having a coke problem. He uses the rose by the dark tower to describe how she brightens his life, but ‘when it snows’ his eyes ‘become large’, and he loses sight of that light.”
“Crack pipes are commonly sold in gas stations as ‘love roses’ or glass rose etc. it’s a small glass tube with a fake rose in it. The glass tube is the crack pipe. Gonna kiss that rose to smoke your crack.”
— Reddit again
“Every song in history can be applied to drugs. Let’s take the song ‘Danny Boy’. Someone could say it is about a crack addiction by reading the line ‘the pipes, the pipes are calling.’ Not every song is about drugs so get over it…just because you have a problem with blow doesn’t mean Seal does too.”
— Someone on Songfacts
The ‘Kiss From A Rose’ story begins with Seal sitting in the kitchen of a horrible London squat. He’s in his early 20s and dreams of becoming a professional musician one day, but all he’s got are some homemade demos.
Things hadn’t been easy for Seal up to this point. Born in London in 1963, he spent the first four years of his life with a foster family, before being returned to his biological parents. His mother was loving and nurtured his musical talents, but his father was physically abusive, and Seal eventually ran away from home. “As soon as I was 15, I escaped,” he told The Guardian. “[My father] gave me one beating too many and I was out the door living it large in London, becoming an adult.”
Seal bounced around between homeless shelters and friends’ sofas, somehow staying in education long enough to earn himself a diploma in architecture. Pop stardom seemed like an absurd pipedream, and became even less likely after a case of lupus left him with his distinctive facial scars.
Then, at 23, Seal’s girlfriend started pushing him to get serious about music. She bought him a 4-track cassette recorder and urged him to make his own demos, which he did by singing all of the instrumental parts one at a time, until he had a demo that sounded roughly like the song in his head.
I was living in a squat. I didn’t have any money and I was just basically getting my act together, trying to figure out who I was musically. I couldn’t play an instrument at the time. But I tried to imagine what an orchestra would do, and I tried to mimic a flute, pizzicato violins and a few other instruments. Essentially an orchestra.
And so, I ended up recording about 16 or 17 tracks of vocals, trying to figure out how to work this machine. And everything was impulsive and instinctive. At the end of the day doing it, I had this thing called ‘Kiss From A Rose’.
I remember kind of listening to the tape, and I kind of tossed the tape to one side, because I wasn’t particularly proud of it.
— Songexploder, 2023
It was now around 1987, and London was vibing to the Rare Groove Scene, a funk and soul movement that eventually birthed succesful acts like Soul II Soul and Brand New Heavies. Seal got a gig singing with Push, one of the Rare Groove bands who were coming up through the scene at the time.
Push and Seal were never a good fit for each other, especially as his songwriting style didn’t work with their old-school funk. The band went on a tour of Japan, and Seal decided not to come home. Instead, he spent most of 1988 bumming around Thailand while trying to figure out his next steps.
When he finally came home, the Summer of Love had been and gone. England had transformed into a Rave Nation.
3. My eyes become large
“We can all relate to this song, especially when you had been obsessively in love with someone you can’t be with. That is why we can’t help, but listen to this song over and over again… It is also verging on the point of masochism. The overall meaning of this song is about masochistic love.”
— Aver Lim
“It’s about eating pussy”
Adam Tinley, aka Adamski, had a very different start to his music career. When he was 11, Tinley wrote and self-produced a song called ‘Babysitters’ which he sent our to various record labels. Indie label Fast Product thought it was great and released it as a single, earning attention from the music press and airtime on John Peel.
The proceeds allowed Tinley to buy more music equipment, and by his early 20s he was one of Britain’s hottest DJs. By 1989 he had a hit single, ‘N-R-G’, and had released one of the first major rave LPs, Liveanddirect. Around the end of the year, he debuted a new track he’d been working on, this thumping beat with an anxious bassline, an idea that had come to him while watching old gangster movies late at night. He called this track ‘The Killer‘.
Seal was trying to break into the rave scene when he met Adamski at a party on Clapham Common. The pair clicked, and started talking about possible collaboration. Seal ended up writing lyrics and recording a vocal for the song that was now called simply ‘Killer‘. It surged to Number One on release, eventually becoming the UK’s second-biggest single of the year (just behind ‘Sacrifice’ by Elton John.)
This should have been a breakthrough moment for Seal, but the joy was dampened by one small detail: he wasn’t credited on the cover of the single. To all intents and purposes, ‘Killer’ was an Adamski solo song.
Early 90s music already had a systemic problem with Black vocalists getting ripped off. People like Lolletta Holloway and Martha Wash had been uncredited on hits like ‘Ride On Time’ and ‘Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance)’. Even worse, they’d been replaced in the videos by light-skinned, lip-syncing models.
Seal did appear in the video for ‘Killer’, at least, albeit as a giant floating head. However, all of the press attention was focused on Adamski, the good-looking white boy with the potential to be rave’s first true pop star. The record label seemed entirely happy to let Seal languish in obscurity.
Smash Hits summed up the situation with their usual prescience:
Fortunately for Seal, Trevor Horn and ZTT Records were already determined to make him a solo star. Horn produced Seal’s first solo album, and Seal’s first credited solo hit, the soulful ‘Crazy’.
(The album also included a new version of ‘Killer’ which was released under Seal’s name in 1991. Adamski is not mentioned on the cover.)
‘Crazy’ gave Seal some chart success in the States, but it was clear that he could and should be doing better. For the second album, he and Trevor Horn moved to Los Angeles, in the hope that total immersion would give the new record a more American sound.
So it’s funny that this was the moment when the ‘Kiss From A Rose’ demo resurfaced. The scratchy old demo was so old-fashioned, so unamerican, so the opposite of what they were working on. But, once Horn heard it, he was obsessed. Seal still thought it was crap, but Trevor knew it could be a hit.
4. My power, my pleasure, my pain
“The greying tower is Batman himself, the one looking for any reason to get away from his depression, but he’s given up. In the sea means he feels all alone. (See the entire Batman series of movies again and you’ll understand.) All together this means there’s nothing out there to save him (from his depression, loneliness, state of constant mourning for the love he cannot replace etc.) until now.”
“The song was written way before the movie was filmed. So it doesn’t make sense to link the song’s meaning to the movie/batman.”
— Reply to the above
Marketing a song like ‘Killer’ is easy. It’s a rave song; you sell it to ravers. But how do you market ‘Kiss From A Rose’? What’s the market for faux-Elizabethan sex ballads with noticeably cryptic lyrics?
Trevor Horn had even struggled to get Seal to take an interest in the song. Horn’s vision involved Seal singing each part of an 8-part harmony, an incredibly difficult task in the days before Pro Tools. Seal got frustrated and was keen to move onto something he believed in. Then Horn had a brainwave.
Horn made sure that the studio was ready to record at all times so that Seal could do some recording work whenever he felt like it, even in the middle of the night. Seal took him up on the offer, often dropping by the studio at 3am.
Trevor: Sometimes you were with friends, very nice friends. And I would say to you, “Hey, Seal, why don’t you do a vocal.”
Seal: And I’d sing better. Trevor’s being tactful. I’d generally walk in with like, some gorgeous, gorgeous lady. Trevor understood if I had an audience to perform in front of, I sang differently.
— Songexploder, 2023
The final recorded version was almost certainly performed as a way of seducing a one-night stand. Multiple one-night stands, in fact, forming an eight-part harmony.
Seal’s second album appeared in 1994. The first single, ‘Prayer For The Dying’, was moderately successful. ‘Kiss From A Rose’ was released as the second track and it bombed quite hard, peaking at Number 20 in the UK charts while entirely missing the Billboard Charts. It seemed Seal was right after all, and the song was just crap.
And this might have been the end of the story, if a Hollywood film producer hadn’t taken an interest. This producer was working on something exciting, the third installment of a beloved franchise, and he wanted something special for the soundtrack. After some negotation, it was agreed that ‘Kiss From A Rose’ would be featured in…
The NeverEnding Story III: Escape from Fantasia.
NeverEnding Story III was mostly straight-to-video, so few people even saw it, let alone heard the song. Fortunately, another director had fallen in love with the song in the meantime: Joel Schumacher, who was taking over from Tim Burton on the Batman franchise. He did everything in his power to get ‘Kiss From A Rose’ into Batman Forever.
God bless him, it didn’t fit in the love scene that he was trying to put the song in, but he loved the song so much, he just stuck it on the end credits. And so, when people went to go and see the movie, the last thing they heard when they were leaving a theater was (sings) “Baby!”
Joel got me down to the studio lot where they’d shot a lot of the movie, and stuck me in front of the bat light, then intercut it with scenes from the movie. Once we got our foot in the door with this juggernaut of a movie, and this great video on MTV, then it had the legs, then it had the staying power.
Batman Forever already had a tentpole soundtrack song in U2’s ‘Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me’, but Bono’s effort didn’t capture the public imagination quite like Seal’s strange, epic ballad. Seal was catapulted to megastardom, winning an armful of Grammys for a song that he’d first hummed into a 4-track ten years previously.
Seal never had another hit as big as ‘Kiss From A Rose’, but he’s never needed one. The song is a perennial classic now, popular enough to allow any songwriter to retire in luxury. When Seal is interviewed these days, the song is the first thing people ask about. And they always want to know: are you singing grey or grave?
5. Now that your rose is in bloom
“What always popped into my mind, including the first time I heard it, was the movie “The Name Of The Rose” which was released in 86, approximately 2 years before he wrote the song. The song has what seems like a medieval quality to it as well, which is when the movie was set.”
— Songfacts (this person might be onto something)
All songs are open to interpretation, and meaning is what you make of it. Even if Seal confirmed he had been writing about oral sex or a crack pipe, it wouldn’t invalidate the meanings that listeners had derived. That’s how art works; that’s what Death of the Author means.
But even the most cryptic author will usually clarify what’s supposed to be on the page. The hilarious and maddening thing about ‘Kiss From A Rose’ is that we still don’t know what the lyrics are. There is no official source on this. One of pop’s biggest mysteries has been hiding in plain sight for 30 years, and its author likes toying with us.
When the album with ‘Kiss From A Rose’ arrived, it didn’t have a lyric sheet, but it did have this note:
One of the most popular questions people seem to ask is “Why don’t you print your lyrics on the album?” Well, the answer to that is that quite often, my songs mean one thing to me and another to the listener. But that’s OK because I think it’s the general vibe of what I’m saying that is important and not the exact literal translation.
How many times have you fallen in love with a lyric that you thought went, “Show me a day with Hilda Ogden and I’ll despair”, only to find that it went “Show me a way to solve your problems and I’ll be there”. I guess what I’m saying is that the song is always larger in the listeners mind because with it they attach imagery which is relative to their own personal experience.
So it is your perception of what I’m saying rather than what I actually say that is key.
Websites like Genius.com state “on the grey” as the correct lyric, but Seal is very clear that it could be something else. In 2021, he appeared on Rick Beato’s YouTube channel, where Beato asked him straight out to confirm the correct lyrics. He replied:
People would always say is it “a kiss from a rose on the grey” or “a kiss from a rose on the grave”… I would say, “What do you think i’m saying?”
Or they would say, “What did you mean when you were saying that?” and I would say, “What do you think I meant?”
They say, “I think you’re saying ‘kiss from a rose on the grave’ because, you know, you’re the lonely greying tower in this desolate wasteland. This woman or this angel comes and she’s kissed you and she’s lifted you up.”
And I would say, “…that’s what it means.”
The Elizabethan era was full of non-standard texts. Shakespeare couldn’t even decide how to spell his own name—people usually called him “Shakespear” until the 18th century. This is rare today, in this age where everything is written down and pedants sniff out any inconsistency.
Thanks to Seal’s mischevous nature, pop music has one great non-standard text and an eternal mystery. “On the grey?” “On the grave?” The definitively correct answer is… well, what do you think he’s saying?
Before reading this, I am sure I must have had an opinion on what Seal was singing in that refrain, and now I can never be sure! Grey? Grave? HgrelaasfaskjfbajL?
I’ve always heard it as “grave”. Also, before reading this, i’ve always hated that song. My workplace in the mid–90s had a local commercial station on (TRENT FM! IN STEREO!) which played it A LOT. I’ve just had a listen to it again and heard it in a new light.