Seal

There is a velvet voice, deep and soft at the same time, that in the nineties made one of the most beautiful love songs of the decade: "Kiss from a Rose". It played in the Batman film, it went to number one, it won the Grammy for record of the year. And here's the incredible part: the man who sang it, Seal, didn't want to release it. He thought it was bad, it embarrassed him, he had kept it in a drawer for years convinced it was worth nothing. They had to insist. The song he almost threw in the bin ended up being the biggest of his career and one of the most loved of its time.

He didn't know what he had

The story is a lesson in how little an artist sometimes knows about his own work. Seal had written "Kiss from a Rose" much earlier, with a strange melody, almost like an old waltz, and it embarrassed him so much that he didn't show it to anyone. His producer rescued it. When they put it in the Batman film, it exploded. Years later, Seal himself admitted, with humour, that only then did he start to like it.

Think about it: one of the most awarded and best-selling songs of the nineties came close to not existing because its author considered it a failure. Greatness sometimes hides exactly where you least see it, even in yourself. Thank goodness someone trusted that song more than the very man who had written it.

The marks that became his face

And there is another thing about Seal, impossible not to notice, that makes him great in a different way: the scars on his face. They are the consequence of an illness called discoid lupus, which he suffered as a young man and which left deep marks on his face. Seal never hid them. He didn't cover them with make-up, he didn't hide them in photographs, he didn't ask for them to be retouched. On the contrary: they became an inseparable part of his image, as recognisable as his voice.

In an industry obsessed with physical perfection, with flawless, retouched faces, Seal stood his ground with his marked face and turned it into identity, into a beauty of his own. That is a form of enormous courage and dignity: taking what the world might see as a flaw and carrying it so naturally that it ends up being a hallmark, something that makes him more himself and not less. He taught, without speeches, that the marks of what you have been through are not something to hide.

What to remember

Seal has one of the warmest voices in pop, and his biggest song, "Kiss from a Rose", came close to not existing because he himself thought it was bad. He won the Grammy for record of the year with a song he had put away out of embarrassment. And he always carried, never hiding them, the scars an illness left on his face, turning them into part of his identity.

Remember it this way: you don't always know what you have, either in your art or on your face. Seal nearly buried his best song, and he showed the world, without fear, marks that others would have hidden. Both things teach the same lesson: what you think is your flaw may in fact be the best of you.

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Sources

Seal (Henry Olusegun Adeola Samuel), British singer and songwriter born on 19 February 1963 in London, of Nigerian and Brazilian descent; living. "Kiss from a Rose", originally released in 1994 and re-released in 1995 for the soundtrack of "Batman Forever", reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and won three Grammy Awards, including record of the year in 1996; Seal has stated that he initially did not want to release it because he considered it poor. The scars on his face are a consequence of discoid lupus, an illness he suffered in his youth, and which he has never hidden. He worked with the producer Trevor Horn and had other hits such as "Crazy". Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, Stereogum and other coverage.