You were just playing me a track the other day. I never look at a genre and go, “Oh, I can’t sing that.”

Horn: You kidding? He had the guest bedroom. Where were you staying, Seal, while Trevor was at Clooney’s future manse? Some wonderful moments, 3 o’clock in the morning in the canyon. So we slowed it down, did a few things, and in the end we had a great time. Seal said, “Look at me - do you think I could move to that track?” It was completely wrong. The funny thing is, when he arrived, I tried a different approach to “Crazy” - I’d done it a bit like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.

I knew we were going to have to put some serious work into it, and I thought it’d be good for Seal to be here. It was really to work on “Crazy,” wasn’t it? Because you’d worked on the song with Guy Sigsworth and got some really good synth stuff, and then we worked with Tim Simenon and we got the middle drum break. They showed up: “What are you doing?!” I said, “I’m setting up a studio in your ballroom.” So I took it, and the minute I came in, I pulled all the furniture out and completely freaked out the owners. I’d managed to get a cheap deal for it because the people who owned it couldn’t rent it out. Trevor Horn: I was staying in a house in Fryman Canyon - it’s George Clooney’s house now, though it wasn’t then. Yet the records also make a prescient argument about the porousness of genre lines as they move among throbbing dance music (“ Crazy”), bluesy acoustic rock (“ Whirlpool”), luxurious torch-song balladry (“ Don’t Cry”) and trippy gospel-funk (“ Future Love Paradise”). To listen back to Seal’s first two albums, both of which he made with producer Trevor Horn, is of course to marvel at the rough-cut beauty of his voice, with its stylish rasp and its promise of a lover’s tender care. The airy, intricately rhythmic folk-soul tune is hardly the best known track from Seal’s self-titled 1994 LP, which sold 4 million copies in the U.S., earned a Grammy nomination for album of the year and spun off the Hot 100-topping “Kiss From a Rose.” But on a recent afternoon the 60-year-old British singer was prepping for a tour meant to commemorate the three decades since he broke out with his 1991 debut (also titled “Seal”) and its smash follow-up. Dressed in a baggy green flight suit, his fingernails painted black, Seal squared himself behind a microphone in a Van Nuys rehearsal studio and bobbed his signature bald head as his five-person band wound its way through the intro of his song “ Fast Changes.”

Kiss from a rose black jack