The Hurting, and Big Yellow lies

Tears for Fears, The Hurting

Every novel has a heartbeat. For Big Yellow Lies, it came from an unlikely place: a 1983 pop record.

Tears for Fears’ debut album, The Hurting, was a high-water mark of early ’80s pop. Their videos were everywhere on MTV, and their sound was equal parts synth-driven polish and raw emotional honesty. For weeks, I carried that record with me on a cassette in my Sony Walkman as I crossed the campus of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Watch Me Bleed was in my ears as I moved between classes, the rhythm setting my pace, the lyrics echoing in my head.

I didn’t know it then, but The Hurting was laying the framework for the story I’d tell years later.

When I began writing Big Yellow Lies, the album’s tracklist fell naturally into place as a kind of hidden structure—a spine for the story, mapped onto the classic hero’s journey:

• Prologue: Suffer the Children
  The book opens in 1987, when four kids sneak into a warehouse by the river. What they see changes everything. Childhood innocence ends in gunfire, and the shadows of that night follow them into adulthood.

• Act 1: The Prisoner
  Mike Cusack is the one who pays. He goes away for twenty years, carrying the burden for all of them. When he walks back into Peoria in 2006, he’s the prisoner stepping into a world that never stopped moving.

• Act 2: Start of the Breakdown
  Secrets don’t stay buried forever. The old conspiracy resurfaces, and Jesse Keaton finds himself caught between loyalty, truth, and survival. The walls close in. The cracks widen. The breakdown begins.

• Act 3: Watch Me Bleed
  This is where it all comes apart—the violence, the betrayals, the storm that nearly drowns the city. It’s the darkest part of the journey, the point where characters are tested and blood is spilled.

• Epilogue: Change
  In the aftermath, nothing is the same. The survivors are scarred, the lies are laid bare, and the world Jesse thought he knew is gone. What comes next is uncertain, but change is the only option.

I didn’t plan it this way at first. But The Hurting became the novel’s secret architecture, its chapter titles borrowed, its emotional beats mirrored. For me, it wasn’t just music. It was memory, and momentum, and a reminder of how the right song at the right moment can stay with you for a lifetime.

Big Yellow Lies is a Peoria noir, but it carries the echoes of Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith’s words in its bones. The Hurting was their masterpiece of youthful pain and resilience. In my story, it became the soundtrack of memory and consequence—the perfect spine for a mystery built on secrets that refuse to fade.