“I worked at a studio and the band would leave their guitars there. I'm left-handed so I couldn't restring them. I just played it upside-down”: Seal wrote his breakthrough hit Crazy after learning two basic chord shapes on a borrowed guitar

Back in 1991, singer-songwriter Seal captured the hearts and minds of music critics and fans worldwide with his eponymous album, which spawned classics like Crazy and Killer.

However, the soulful artist, who began his career singing in local clubs in his native London, touring with the funk band Push and joining a blues band in Thailand, traces the moment he decided to learn guitar – inspired by Hendrix, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Joni Mitchell – as a turning point in his budding career.

“One of the things that these artists that I've been so inspired by all have in common is that they play an instrument. They're not just singers or songwriters – they actually play an instrument,” he says in an interview with Vertex Effects.

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“And I figured, well, what would be the best thing for me to learn? I was a bit of a wanderer, and I couldn't put a piano on my back, so I picked up the guitar in the studio where I was working.”

Seal recalls how bands would come in at night to record their material and leave their guitars at the studio during the day. He would use that opportunity to borrow their instruments and hone his craft.

“I'm left-handed, so I couldn't go restringing their guitars. I just played it upside-down. And I remember the guy who owned the studio, he said to me, ‘You know, if you play the E shape, right, and the A shape, if you just know those two shapes, and you move them up and down the neck, you can pretty much play the basis of any song.'”

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Seal goes on to demonstrate these two chord shapes on his Kiesel AC275 acoustic-electric guitar, and explains how these simple chords eventually led him to write Crazy, his first commercial hit.

“It's basically the E and the A shape. So I did that, and that was the first song, Crazy, that I wrote on guitar. I wrote Crazy in about 20-25 minutes. It all kind of fell out. When I wrote that, I went, ‘Okay, I got one.’ It sounded different from all of the crappy demos that I was making. For the first time, it sounded like Seal.”