Album of the Day-April 30
The Waterboys — Fisherman’s Blues
The Waterboys — Fisherman’s Blues
30.April.2020
The Waterboys
Fisherman’s Blues
1988
The fourth album from The Waterboys finds the band opening its doors both musically and creatively.
Led by Mike Scott, Fisherman’s Blues enlists +/- 24 people to help realize the album.
While The Waterboys had been labeled a hybrid between Van Morrison and U2 those comparisons became moot on Fisherman’s Blues — if they even mattered before.
Fisherman’s Blues came three years after the successful This is the Sea. That album thankfully completed the Phil Spector “big sound” phase of The Waterboys. The album them a hit with “The Whole of the Moon” and high praise from none other than U2’s Bono who puts This is the Sea on his top ten list saying: “In rock, the word ‘poet’ gets thrown around a lot. Not here.”
When it came time to record the follow-up, the obvious career choice would have been to make This is the Sea 2…but Mike Scott and The Waterboys are anything but obvious and that wasn’t the plan. Despite the accolades and success, Mike Scott had said:
That overdubbed big-sounding music, I didn’t need to do it anymore.
Outside looking in, it may seem like Fisherman’s Blues is an unexpected departure. But it’s just a creative jump…albeit a creative jump few bands attempt to make…and of the few that do even fewer do it successfully.
Leaping from straight forward big rock to something as layered and textured as Fisherman’s Blues is no small feat. It’s a process and evolution…and those things take time. Mike Scott has described the making Fisherman’s Blues:
We started recording our fourth album in early ’86 and completed it 100 songs and 2 years later.
Fisherman’s Blues is a diverse album that offers a little of everything:
A Woody Guthrie cover — “This Land is Your Land”
A Van Morrison cover — “Sweet Thing”
A collaboration between Irish Poet W.B. Yeats and Mike Scott — “The Stolen Child”
An Irish traditional — “When Will We Be Married”
Not surprisingly, it’s this diverse mixture of both traditional music, literary collaboration, country music, and rock and roll that confounded critics upon its release. Despite that, Fisherman’s Blues still found an audience and built on what they achieved with This is the Sea.
This seemingly odd assemblage of songs found an audience and continued the band’s upward trajectory. The album went into the Top 20 in the UK and charted on the Billboard album chart in the US.
Throughout the years’ Fisherman’s Blues would become so successful that it would warrant a two-disc collectors edition in 2006. And in 2013, the whole two-year Fisherman’s Blues recording journey and process were released in a seven-disc 25th-anniversary edition.
No need to jump dive into the two or seven-disc versions here. The initial 13 track Fisherman’s Blues is pure perfection…and then if you dig that, you have the opportunity to go deep.