When it came to writing and recording an album based on the works of legendary Irish poet W. B. Yeats, Mike Scott didn’t mind allowing that idea to slowly come to fruition. Nearly two decades after his initial foray into wedding Yeats’ words within the fabric of a song, he jumped fully into the venture once timing and creative inspiration conveniently meet.
His mom, a university literature professor, introduced the young Scott to the works of Yeats. As the leader of the Waterboys, he noticed how Yeats’ poems had a melodic flair that could be easily be set to music. The debut of this discovery, “The Stolen Child,” came out in 1988 on the Waterboys’ Celtic rock classic Fisherman’s Blues. Afterwards, he returned to the Nobel Prize-winning poet and recorded a few more tracks.
In 2005 Scott had a flood of inspiration, which led to 20 completed numbers. Still, five more years passed before he performed them onstage and another before he released An Appointment with Mr. Yeats in Europe. Finally out in North America, the album offers a perfect relationship of Yeats’ stanzas that deal with spirituality and mysticism with Scott’s sympathetic melodies.
Today, Scott enthusiastically discusses An Appointment with Mr. Yeats while keeping abreast of the time. In a sign of running a very tight ship for survival in the modern music industry he has to dash off to auditions in order to put together a U.S. version of the Waterboys.
“I have a great band in Britain. Most of them live in London, but it’s so expensive to tour abroad, at least to tour in the United States with my British band. And I have a place in New York, so I spend some of my time here. I figured it might be a good idea to put together an American version of the Waterboys. It’ll be myself and Steve Wickham, longtime Waterboys fiddler, and new American musicians.
Other than one Yeats show when the album was released, and then you won’t be touring again until July. Why is that?
Well, I’m only putting together my American operation. I don’t yet have a tour manager or any crew members. I’ve got a couple members of the band, but I’ve still got two or three to find. I figured that going straight into a tour when I’m already putting other things together myself — I don’t have management — would be unwise.
I thought I’ll do one show, New York, where I know I can make it work. Then, take a bit of time to set up the proper touring, which is a sensible way of going about it for me because I don’t have an organization to take care of all of it.
Not having an organization, is that on the one hand trying but on the other hand a bit of freedom for you that you’re not tied down?
MS: Well, I’d be free anyway. When I say no organization, I have what I would call an organization in Britain. I’ve got a great tour manager, great crew and full-time band. So, I’ve still got lots of freedom as far as music according to my own decisions and once I’ve put together an organization here in America, I’ll still do the music where I want it.
The album An Appointment with Mr. Yeats was originally released in 2011?
2011 in Europe, yes.
And it’s just coming out now in the U.S. Is that schedule of the modern music industry, releasing it in different territories at different times and promoting it for years, does that rattle you at all or do you just get used to it?
Oh I’m fine with it. Doesn’t rattle me at all. I worked so long on this Mr. Yeats project in my imagination for 15, 20 years that spreading out the release dates and the campaign so that it lasts for two or three years is no hardship at all. Glad to be able to take my time and do it properly.
At the same time, it has been a very long, ongoing endeavor. Was it best that you worked on it almost as a hobby rather than piling through it say in 1995?
I don’t know. Well, the decision wasn’t really based on that kind of criteria. What it was, I waited until I had enough great Yeats’ interpretations. Yeats’ words are among the finest written in the English language so I had to do something really good to match up to that, and I took my time with it. I didn’t go public with it as a project until I felt that I had a sufficiently high quality collection of arrangements. So, timing.
What is it that attracts you to Yeats and why should it be his poetry recommended to others who may not be as familiar with him as you are?
Well, I like him because I like the subjects he writes about. I share his interests and I like the way he uses language. He’s a very, very great user of the English language.
You originally used his poetry on “The Stolen Child” on 1988’s Fisherman’s Blues. What was the original desire back then to put his words to music because the only other person who immediately comes to mind who did such a thing is Van Morrison? What made you think that this is a good idea that needs to be done and hopefully Yeats’ followers won’t crucify you for doing that?
Well, I never cared what Yeats’ aficionados thought. If they had a problem with me doing it, I don’t really care about that. It was simply that the poem, “The Stolen Child” stood there on the page and seemed to me to cry out for music. It rhymed. It had a chorus that I heard in my mind as a melody. So, it’s just a small jump from that to writing music for it. And really, it was just because it was there. Like [George] Mallory who climbed Everest and someone asks, “Why?” and he says, “Because it’s there.” Well, just because Yeats poems were there and they spoke to me from the page and said, “Please, set us to music.”
The wonderful thing about it is once you got through that one you knew that you could do more.
Yeah, I didn’t do any more for a couple of years. I think the next one I did was “Love and Death,” which I set to music in 1991. That was on the Waterboys album, Dream Harder, which came out in the ‘90s. I did two or three others shortly after that, and a couple more in the late ‘90s. Then, in 2005 I had a sudden Yeats burst at that point. And that was when I knew I was beginning to approach having the crucial number of interpretations of high enough quality that I can lead a stage show and an album.
I read that you read the first line or two of his poetry and if a melody jumped out at you, you’d continue with it. If not, then you’d move on.
Exactly. I did hone in on my favorite poems or ones that I thought that people should hear. There was no contrived process to it. It was simply that I went through the book of poetry and I was available as a music writer and made myself available to the poems, and if this line of a poem suggested a melody, yes, I’d continue with that poem. If it didn’t, I’d move on to the next poem. I didn’t have favoritism around the poems. I didn’t pre-judge them.
Sometimes, you’d grab a line here or a line there to create the lyrical content for a song.
Sometimes, I would use two poems to make one song or in the case of say “White Birds,” on the album the main verses are from the poem “White Birds,” ever so slightly edited, and the bridge is from one of his plays. It’s a passage from one of his plays that I thought was compatible with “White Birds” and served to add a bridge that would turn it into a more powerful song.
Another thing that changed was in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The rhyming system that Yeats deploys in that is A-B, A-B. So, one and three rhyme and lines two and four rhyme but that doesn’t work when you set it to music. The ear is confounded by that. The ear wants to hear A-A, B-B. So I flipped lines around, which gave it a slightly otherworldly sense to it and rhymed beautifully and that’s the way you hear it on the album.
I couldn’t have done that if I had to have the approval of the estate because, understandably, they have been very protective of Yeats’ work. In the past, they’ve only allowed people to do musical arrangements if you don’t change the lyric at all. For a lot of reasons they’re protective. So, I had to wait ‘til the poems came out of copyright and then I worked on it creatively without having to compromise a bit.
As an experienced songwriter, I’m not prepared to write songs if I have to compromise a song to another agency. That defeats the whole artistic process. I won’t do it, and Yeats damn well wouldn’t have done it either.
One other song I want to focus on is “September 1913.” So much of Yeats’ work has elements of spirituality and mysticism but that one was very interesting due to the politics it addressed then and its significance now. Is that the reason why you picked that?
Oh, I’m really sorry to disappoint you…Well, I don’t know if it’ll disappoint you, but I picked it because of the melody and it worked musically. Now, I was very pleased to get one of Yeats’ big political poems in there because it was an area that wasn’t covered, that was already set to music. So, I was really glad to get it, but I didn’t go gunning for that poem.
As an artist dealing with someone like Yeats, does it matter if it’s Waterboys fans or music fans in America who may not know him as well or revere him as well as they do in Great Britain or is it like here’s the album, listen to it?
To me an album is a success if people can enjoy it whether or not they’ve heard of Yeats. It should work as a collection of rock songs. You shouldn’t have to be interested in Yeats or to know about Yeats or be a poetry aficionado to enjoy the record. I think it can work just…I could have called it “Songs of Wandering Aengus” or some title from one of the songs and I think it would still have worked.
It does work as a set of songs with melodies and everything else that goes into it. A couple more and we’re all set. Your book, Adventures of a Waterboy, what gave you the impetus to write your memoir?
It’s funny. It’s the same thing as Yeats. It’s an idea that I had about 20 years ago that took me a long time to get to. And when I lived in Ireland in the second half of the 1980s, I had so many wonderful adventures in the west of Ireland that I realized that one day I’m going to have to write a book about this. At the end of 2007 I came off tour. I had a busy touring year and I knew I wasn’t going to be back on the road for about 18 months, and that was my opportunity to finally write the book.
Was there any sense of setting the record straight?
The book is an opportunity to set the record straight apparently but I didn’t approach it in that way. That was a byproduct. Really, I wrote it for the fun of it because it was inside me wanting to come out.
It’s interesting that you mentioned about living in Ireland because I was watching a DVD about Bob Dylan and the Band. It covers the early years of the Band when they were the Hawks, playing with Dylan and then moving to Woodstock. It discussed how during the Woodstock period Dylan just went over and played music with them for fun, what became the Basement Tapes, and how those sessions transformed him. He was already transitioning in a way but those sessions helped send him that direction, musically and with his subject matter. So, would you say that living in Ireland was your Woodstock, Basement Tapes moment?
Oh, yes, yes! That was my salvation and that’s absolutely true.
To fully grasp that is that why it took three years to make Fisherman’s Blues ?
Well, on and off, yeah.
Was it that grueling or was it just experimenting all the time?
A lot of that time we were on tour. The first year officially was 1986. I’ll calculate because I did some sleeve notes for one of the re-issues. We did 21 days of studio time in that first year. So, that was very light work. We spent most of the year on tour. In 1987 yeah, that was, I shouldn’t call it grueling but we kind of labored at it for six months, mostly non-stop studio work. And then I had to come out of the studio for six months because I was so confounded by having so many tracks to choose from. I needed to get a serious break from it. And it wasn’t until…in fact it was about nine months later that we went to Spiddal and finished the record in a two-month batch of sessions.
So, it’s not really…I’ve got to be very articulate with it. I can’t say it took us three years to make the album because we hadn’t spent three years in the studio. We probably spent about nine months in the studio in that whole period.
That sounds much less stressful than three years.
Plenty of time outs out of the studio for learning, for absorbing new music and all that wonderful Celtic, Irish music that was an influence on us then.
Going back and forth from Great Britain to New York, is there a New York influence going into things now?
Oh yeah. It’s definitely having an influence. It’s having a big impact because I see music almost every night and I meet musicians all the time. Joe Strummer’s Law — To have output, you must have input.
