Seal shared a sweet tribute to late director Joel Schumacher, whom he credited with helping boost his career to the next level when the filmmaker included “Kiss From a Rose” on the Batman Forever soundtrack. Schumacher died Monday after a year-long battle with cancer at the age of 80.
Seal shared his remembrance on Instagram, opening the video with a short acoustic rendition of his signature song. He went on to explain that “Kiss From a Rose” was originally released in 1994, the fourth and final single from his second album, Seal II, and it was a fast flop, bottoming out of the charts in a couple of weeks.
But as Seal was turning his attention to his next LP, Schumacher reached out to see if he had any music that might fit a love scene in Batman Forever between Val Kilmer’s Bruce Wayne and Nicole Kidman’s Dr. Chase Meridian. While Seal said he didn’t, his manager, Bob Cavallo, took it upon himself to send Schumacher a copy of Seal II, and placed an asterisk next to “Kiss From a Rose.”
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“The next day, Joel came back and said, ‘Look, I’ve temped it in the love scene, it doesn’t work, but I love the song so much, I’m just gonna stick it on the end credits.’ And four Grammys later and another 8 million albums, we always knew,” Seal joked, before adding: “Well, the reality of the situation is, nobody knew, except I guess for Joel, who had faith in the song.”
Along adding “Kiss From a Rose” to the end credits of Batman Forever, Schumacher made a video for the song, mixing leftover footage from the film with shots of Seal under the Batlight. “He didn’t even charge me for it,” Seal quipped. “Subsequently, kids thought I was Batman because the song was so big!”
In closing, Seal said, “I owe my career I guess in large part to Joel Schumacher, who took a chance. Who took a song that was always a good song, but a kind of unconventional one, so it wasn’t immediately palatable. But the difference was that everyone who went to see that movie, when they came out of that theater, the last they heard was, ‘Baby!’ And I guess it kind of stuck.”
He continued: “I just want to say, I love you, Joel, thank you so much for everything you’ve done for me and the joy and the love that you brought to millions of people around the world. One day we’ll all meet again back home.”
