Monday, January 2, 2017

Monday Music "Prayers for the Dying" and "Kiss from a Rose" by Seal


I decided to roll with a song or actually 2 songs from the 90's from Seal.  I heard of Seal when his "Prayer for the dying" came out.  I thought it was a haunting song and to me it talked about dying, crossing over and rebirth, it was a really good song.  But I couldn't find anything about the song in any of my sources.  But I added the song as the first video.   I also included Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" from Batman as the other song.  It is also a good song and it did well in the charts. 





"Kiss from a Rose" is a song from Seal's second eponymous album. The song was first released as a single in July 1994. Re-released in 1995, it was included on the Batman Forever film soundtrack, helping it top the charts in the U.S. and Australia. At the 1996 Grammy Awards, it won awards for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.


"Kiss from a Rose" was written in 1987, several years prior to the release of Seal's eponymous debut album from 1991. After writing the song Seal felt "embarrassed by it" and "threw the tape in the corner". Seal did not present it to producer Trevor Horn until the recording sessions for Seal II. In 2015, Seal said of the song: "To be honest, I was never really that proud of it, though I like what Trevor did with the recording. He turned that tape from my corner into another 8 million record sales and my name became a household name."
"Kiss from a Rose" was the second single taken from the Batman Forever film soundtrack, and topped the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 for one week in August 1995. It also went to number four on the UK Singles Chart. The single originally made it to #20 in 1994, but upon being re-released after being featured in the film, it reached the top position. It also won the MTV Movie Award for Best Song from a Movie in the 1996 edition. Seal talked about the long, strange journey that the song went through on The Brian McKnight Show season finale that aired 30 May 2010. He described how the song initially dropped out of the charts shortly after its release. Joel Schumacher subsequently called Seal, and requested use of the song to play over a love scene between the characters played by Nicole Kidman and Val Kilmer in Batman Forever. Although the song was eventually not incorporated into this scene, it was instead used to play over the end credits; Seal believes this change contributed to the song's eventual popularity.



Two versions of the music video were produced:   I knew the second version, but saw the top version this morning doing this blog post.



  • The second version was directed by Joel Schumacher and has Seal performing the song beside the Bat-Signal, interspersed with clips from the film Batman Forever, with one clip from Batman Returns. This is the more popular video of the song. The director of photography of this version of the music video was Neil Abramson.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the background, I didn't know that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the background, I didn't know that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The only thing I remember about Seal is he married Heidi Klum. I know...I'm lame.

    ReplyDelete

I had to change the comment format on this blog due to spammers, I will open it back up again in a bit.