Gary Jules, courtesy

You can call it a comeback, if you want. After all, Gary Jules has been gone.

Twenty years ago, Jules scored a hit with a haunting cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” recorded with friend Michael Andrews. Now he’s back with a 20th anniversary edition re-recording of the song. But until recently, he’d all but disappeared from the music industry.

After his first album got lost in the shuffle of a record company merger, the success of “Mad World” was a happy accident. Featured in movie “Donnie Darko,” the cover was recorded in just two takes while Jules was recording his album Trading Snakeoil for Wolftickets. At the time, the film was in production limbo, and Andrews and Jules weren’t sure it would ever see the light of day.

As a working musician before streaming and social media, Jules took every gig he was offered. He toured, he made more albums and he even opened for Tears for Fears. When Roland Orzabal called him to congratulate him on the success of his version of “Mad World,”he thought he was being punked.

“’I just wanted you to know that I like your version better than ours,’” Jules said the Tears for Tears member told him. “’The way that you interpreted it was closer to what I meant when I wrote it.’”

Tears for Fears ended up changing the way they performed their own song live, slowing it down like Jules.

However, having a family was becoming increasingly difficult to square with his life as a performer. Being a good husband and father was his priority, and he felt like his life in Los Angeles “didn’t jive at all with having kids.”

“The treadmill for musicians in the early 2000s was in a really high gear, so you had to just keep going,” Jules said.

So he got off. Jules and his family moved to North Carolina, where his wife, Greta Aguirre, is from. Aguirre, a former model, started a skincare line and grew herbs for her products on her family’s farm. She got her husband to help out with the harvesting, as well as building raised beds with organic soil for her plants.

“Basically, I was a guitar playing farmhand,” he said with a smile.

Interest in Gary Jules spiked again when Adam Lambert covered “Mad World” in the same slowed-down style on “American Idol” in 2009, but Jules wasn’t tempted to capitalize on it.

“I wanted to be a musician, but I also wanted to be a present father and partner,” he said.

He continued to stay busy, recording for movie and TV placements in his home studio. In 2013, French superstar Mylene Farmer persuaded Jules to leave home for a jaunt around Europe with her for a few months. It was a nice change from touring the U.S. in an economy car, he said. Then he went back to semi-obscurity.

It wasn’t until the pandemic that friend and former bandmate Al Sgro reached out about the upcoming “Mad World” 20th anniversary, and the possibility of making new music together. With his children now in their teens, Jules agreed to return to Southern California to plot and play music. The two wanted to find a way to mark the anniversary and also show audiences that Jules is more than just “the ‘Mad World’ guy.”

Still, he doesn’t mind being known for the cover. As an artist, a cover can let listeners know “that you understand the slipstream that you’re in before you can embellish on it,” he said.

Sgro helped Jules put together a band with some old friends and new ones.

“The process of putting all of us in the room, and then working those songs out; it’s the kind of stuff that can’t happen online, it only happens in a room with musicians,” he said.

Jules said he’s working on a new project—presumably an album—for a 2024 release, but he doesn’t want to get ahead of himself. Right now, he’s concentrating on playing a few local shows and working the muscle of playing with a band again. He started in November, at the Hotel Café in Los Angeles, where he played many of his early career shows.

“The excitement from feeling your voice as one of a three-part harmony; that is the thing that kind of lifts the song up,” he said.

While Jules said he’s happy to be back in California for a while, he doesn’t regret leaving and called it the best thing to happen to his family. It was better that his kids grew up in the mountains, in nature, with a father who was not recognizably famous.

Jules doesn’t mind that he hit it big with a song he didn’t write.

“I love interpreting music, and I especially love taking songs that were written one way and changing them to be something else based on something that I found in them,” he said.

The success of “Mad World” gave him the opportunity to build the life he wanted for himself and his family. He’s cognizant of the fact that not all musicians ever get that kind of break.

“I’m so grateful for everything that happened,” Jules said.

Follow Rachel Alm at Twitter.com/thouzenfold and Instagram.com/thousandfold.