Seal

Seal Samuel is a three-time Grammy Award-winning English soul vocalist and songwriter known as much for his music as he is for the distinctive scars on his face. The scars are the result of a childhood battle with a chronic autoimmune disease called discoid lupus that attacks the body’s cells and tissues resulting in inflammation and tissue damage. Discoid lupus can be fatal.

He was born as Seal Henry Olusegun Olumide Adeola Samuel on February 19, 1963 in London, . His parents Adebisi Samuel, from immigrant, and Francis Samuel, an Afro-Brazilian immigrant to America.

After studying architecture and engineering in school, he graduated with an architectural degree. He immediately began working in various electrical engineering jobs and even designed leather clothing for a while. Then he began singing in local clubs and bars.

In the mid-1980s he joined an English funk band called Push and toured . While on tour in Asia he joined a Thailand-based blues band and stayed with the group for a short time before traveling on his own.

When Seal returned to he met relatively unknown house and techno producer Adamski. The two worked together with Seal providing the lyrics and vocals for Adamski’s Killer, which became a number one hit on the charts in 1990 and was also very popular in the nightclubs.

In 1991 Seal signed a solo record contract with ZTT Records and released his debut album Seal produced by Trevor Horn who had previously worked with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Buggles.

The first single from the album, Crazy, became a number 15 hit in the . When the album was released in , the single reached number seven on the American charts. The album sold more than three million copies around the world.

Seal took three years to complete his second release. The album featured singles like Prayer for the Dying and Newborn Friend, and received a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year. The third single, Kiss From a Rose, was featured in the film Batman Forever (Starring Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Chris O Donnell and Nicole Kidman) and in 1996 won Seal a Grammy Award for Song of the Year.

In 1998 Seal released Human Being with Warner Brothers Records. Seal planned to release a new album called Togetherland in 2001, but the album was cancelled. Seal claimed it wasn’t good enough, but there were rumors that the label turned the album down because it didn’t think it would be commercially successful.

In 2003, Seal released Seal IV and followed that up with a greatest hits album, entitled Seal: Best 1991-2004 in 2004. The same year he performed a couple of shows at Olympia Theater in Paris, . The shows were recorded and sold in 2005 as a CD/DVD package called Live in Paris.

On January 10, 2005, just six days after Seal and supermodel Heidi Klum announced their engagement, Seal criticized rappers in a magazine interview for portraying women negatively in both their videos and lyrics.

The couple has two children together: son Henry Günther Ademola Dashtu Samuel born on September 12, 2005 and son Johan Riley Fyodor Taiwo Samuel born on November 22, 2006.