Most albums, like books, are best not judged by their covers, but the Waterboys' A Rock in the Weary Land is an exception to the rule. One glance at the cover, which features frontman Mike Scott holding what appears to be the world's largest electric guitar, and you've pretty much got the plot: Freudian interpretations and camera tricks aside, this is obviously Scott's "Guitar Album." Just like the blurred guitar headstock in the foreground of the album, the music inside is never less than in your face: big, bold, brash and beautiful -- and a good deal louder than anything Scott has ever before committed to tape.
"I made a decision at the beginning of the album that I wanted to work on the sound," explains Scott of the album's sonic direction, which is as amplified and distorted as the band's 1988 effort Fisherman's Blues was acoustic-based and folksy. "On my last couple of records, I left the sound in the hands of my co-producers, and I focused my attentions on the songwriting and the performances. Then I heard OK Computer by Radiohead and realized that they had seen every instrument on the album as an opportunity to explore sonically. I remembered a time when I used to do that, and I decided to do that again."
Scott did his homework. Before he even entered the studio, the Edinburgh-born singer-songwriter scoured music shops in his adopted hometown of London for new toys that would allow him to experiment with different combinations of effects. By the time he got to the studio, he says, "I was like a kid cut loose."
"I developed almost a whole culture of my own new sounds that I was dying to try out," he says. "I still kept my eye on the songs, the performances and the arrangements, but I added the sonic exploration." Among his favorite discoveries was the distorted vocal effect he got by crossing a blues harmonica mike with a fuzzbox called the "Culture Vulture." The result? What he aptly describes as the "raging, electric vocal sound" that crackles through the opening "Let It Happen" and sets the dizzying tone for the entire album.
Scott was so excited by the new direction his music was taking that he decided to step away from the solo career he'd begun with 1995's Bring 'Em All In and 1997's Still Burning and release the new album under the name the Waterboys -- a tag he hadn't used since 1993's Dream Harder. "I wanted more people to hear the record," he admits. "When I'm making a record, there's no difference between a Mike Scott and a Waterboys record -- I don't think of what name it's under. But I learned through experience that when I put a record out as Mike Scott, people just don't recognize the music. But they know my music by the name the Waterboys."
Apart from the recognition factor, the distinction has always been one of courtesy, seeing as how the Waterboys are essentially Scott and whatever band of musicians he's working with at the time, in either the studio or on the road. "The most band-like albums we ever made were Fisherman's Blues and Room to Roam," Scott admits, referring to the Waterboys' landmark 1988 Celtic-folk album and its like-minded follow-up. "With all the other albums, I was the guy with the record deal and the guy driving it, however much it looked like a band." The only reason he released Bring 'Em All In under his own name was because he literally recorded it solo. "It's not a Waterboys record if there's only one man on it," he says, laughing. He had studio help on Still Burning two years later, but stuck to the solo game plan. "I don't know if I had to prove something to myself or what, but I enjoyed it," he says of the solo years. "I'd gone through a lot of changes and learned a lot about what made me tick, and it was a good time for a change."
The same need for change has naturally led to his reclaiming of the Waterboys identity, both as a name to release albums under and as a touring band. Having tested the waters with a handful of dates earlier this year, Scott will bring the Waterboys back to the U.S. for a twenty-date tour scheduled to begin September 22nd in Lyons, Colorado. A short U.K. tour will follow. He says he looks forward to recording a new Waterboys album with his current touring band -- which includes fiddle player Steve Wickham, a verteran of the Fisherman's Blues era band. Wickham returns to the fold with particularly good timing, because, in addition to A Rock in a Weary Land (which was released last year in Europe but has only now made it on U.S. shelves, with a couple of additional tracks), Scott has also recently completed an album of unfinished tracks dating back to the original Fisherman's Blues sessions. Titled Too Close to Heaven, the album will be released in Europe this month and in America early next year.
"They were the songs that weren't finished," Scott says of the material. "We were recording so much music and we were spending so much time doing it that by the end I couldn't make decisions between songs or even different verses of the same song. I loved all the music that we played, and my God, we played a lot of music for Fisherman's Blues, but I just couldn't find my way through the maze of it. It was all I could do to put together the album that you know as Fisherman's Blues. But it meant that there were forty, fifty other tracks gathering dust somewhere. And I've always wanted to go back and finish the best ones and put them on another record."
The look back with Too Close to Heaven is a bit atypical for Scott, who has made a career out of continually moving forward -- from the sax-laced "big music" of the Waterboys' earlier years through to the Celtic folk of Fisherman's Blues, the stream-lined rock of Dream Harder, the eclectic introspection of the solo albums and now the distorted adventures in hi-fi feedback of A Rock in the Weary Land.
"The form of the music changes all the time, but the purpose is always to inspire," Scott says. "C.S. Lewis used to say, 'Other people don't write the books I want to read, so I write them myself.' I feel that way with records. Nobody makes quite the records I want to hear, so I make them myself."
Not surprisingly, he regards A Rock in the Weary Land with unabashed pride, and notes that most of the fan comments he's read on the Web have been positive, once people have gotten used to the layers of distortion and discovered the songs waiting beneath. "I think this is a great Waterboys album," he says readily. "It's in the top one or two, up there with [1985's] This Is the Sea. And I think time will prove it."
RICHARD SKANSE
(September 21, 2001)