![](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/0\/09\/Mike_Scott_at_The_Hague_2002_1.jpg\/220px-Mike_Scott_at_The_Hague_2002_1.jpg\")
Legendary Scottish bandleader and songwriter finds new inspiration in the poetry of W.B. Yeats on the Waterboys\u2019 first new album in a half-decade <\/p>\n
Legendary Scottish bandleader and songwriter finds new inspiration in the poetry of W.B. Yeats on the Waterboys\u2019 first new album in a half-decade <\/p>\n
An Appointment With Mr. Yeats to be released March 26, 2013
on Proper American<\/p>\n
DUBLIN, Ireland \u2014 In what stands as one of the boldest, most ambitious projects of his storied career, Waterboys auteur Mike Scott has collaborated, figuratively speaking, with the legendary Irish poet W.B. Yeats on the 14 songs of An Appointment With Mr. Yeats, due out on Proper American on March 26, 2013. <\/p>\n
\u201cI love the way Yeats\u2019 poems lend themselves to music,\u201d says Scott. \u201cBut I also like Yeats as a guy \u2014 a dandified, opinionated, larger-than-life character. I feel a kinship to him. My purpose isn\u2019t to treat Yeats as a museum piece, but to connect with the soul of the poems \u2014 as they appear to me \u2014 then go wherever the music in my head suggests, and that means some surprising places.\u201d Scott will bring the Waterboys to New York\u2019s Town Hall in March for the American premiere of this provocative song cycle uniting a pair of artists separated by a century. <\/p>\n
While the notion of mounting classic poems in modern musical settings may strike some as challengingly esoteric, that is not the case at all with An Appointment With Mr. Yeats. On the contrary, the new album connects with the power and immediacy of Waterboys classics like This Is the Sea (1985) and Fisherman\u2019s Blues (1988), unfolding with the widescreen vividness that has characterized Scott\u2019s single-minded body of work during the course of the last three decades. This captivating oeuvre has come to be known as \u201cThe Big Music\u201d after the early Waterboys song of the same name. At the same time, this wildly imaginative work heralds yet another musical metamorphosis in the ever-mutable world of the Waterboys.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen people read about this project, it\u2019s natural for them to have preconceptions,\u201d Scott acknowledges. \u201cThey tend to think that, because it\u2019s based on poetry, it\u2019s going to be difficult, stiff or wordy. But when they hear the record or come and see the show, they realize it\u2019s really just more music from the Waterboys. I should stress these are songs \u2014 rock \u2019n\u2019 roll, pop, psychedelic and roots songs \u2014 not recitations. They\u2019ve got to stand up as contemporary songs, not like poems squashed into musical forms. In fact, the best thing is when people don\u2019t realize they were written a hundred years ago, but just hear them and think, \u2018That\u2019s a song,\u2019 and don\u2019t question it.\u201d<\/p>\n
An Appointment With Mr. Yeats was produced by Scott and Marc Arciero and tracked live off the floor by an expanded Waterboys lineup consisting of fiddle maestro Steve Wickham, Katie Kim (vocals), James Hallawell (keyboards), Kate St John (sax, oboe), Blaise Margail (trombone), Ralph Salmins (drums), Sarah Allen (flute) and Joe Chester (guitar). Before they recorded the album, Scott and his band premiered the songs at Dublin\u2019s hallowed Abbey Theatre during a five-night run in March 2010. \u201cA stunning reinvention of Yeats\u2019 poetry,\u201d The Irish Times raved.<\/p>\n
The stylistically wide-ranging album gets off to a thunderous start with \u201cThe Hosting of the Shee,\u201d as the band brings to life Yeats\u2019 depiction of the warlike gods of old Ireland. \u201cIt isn\u2019t just the language of the poem that attracted me,\u201d Scott clarifies. \u201cIt\u2019s what he says with it \u2014 the way that he allows us to enter an old Celtic dreamscape. I loved going into that world with Yeats. I even asked the drummer to play it in a pre-Christian groove, to play it like a caveman. He never falls into a regular groove; he never puts the snare on the two and the four; it\u2019s a warlike, prehistoric beat.\u201d <\/p>\n
The Kurt Weil-styled \u201c’News for the Delphic Oracle\u201d contains \u201cthree verses, each with a very different character, including Yeats\u2019 invocation of the god Pan in the third verse,\u201d says Scott, \u201cso I\u2019ve treated them as three separate pieces.\u201d The blues ballad \u201cThe Lake Isle of Innisfree\u201d is actually a home demo, with Wickham\u2019s snarling fuzztone fiddle added later. And the epic rocker \u201cSeptember 1913\u201d is taken from one of Yeats\u2019 most overtly political poems, written about what\u2019s known as the Dublin Lockout. \u201cThe laborers went on strike for better working conditions, and the clergy and the politicians resisted the change and tried to blackmail the workers,\u201d Scott explains. \u201cYeats was very angry, and he asked the question in the poem, \u2018Is this what the freedom fighters died for?\u2019 It\u2019s a very powerful poem, and a famous one in Ireland, often quoted to comment on the current Irish situation with the crooked bankers and the financial crisis that\u2019s been going on in Ireland the last few years.\u201d <\/p>\n
Scott has been on quite a creative roll in recent years, having authored an enthusiastically received memoir, Adventures of a Waterboy (available in the States on the Hal Leonard-distributed Jawbone Press), while the new album is the result of two decades of dedication and a lifelong fascination with Yeats\u2019 poetry. \u201cMy mother is a university lecturer in English literature, so I grew up in a house full of books,\u201d says Scott. \u201cWhen I was a kid, my mum talked about Yeats in hushed tones \u2014 and she pronounced it \u2018Yates,\u2019 which rhymes with \u2018great.\u2019 So it was a very serious, awe-inspiring name around the house, and I had a sense of Yeats being this magical figure. Later, as a teenager, I began to read his poetry for myself and got to discover him in my own time. <\/p>\n
\u201cThen, the first time the Waterboys played Dublin, I bought a volume of his poetry and became attracted to it all over again, but this time with greater understanding. Yeats\u2019 poems seem to be exquisitely and deliberately sculpted, and yet they flow lightly off the tongue. I noticed that a lot of them lined and scanned like song lyrics. To me that was like an open window to go through; I had to put them to music because they were crying out for it. On the Fisherman\u2019s Blues album, I made my first attempt at putting one of his poems to music with \u2018The Stolen Child,\u2019 and it became a favorite track on that album for a lot of people. Shortly after, I decided that Yeats\u2019 poetry deserved a whole album, or even a whole stage show, and first I imagined it would be a \u2018various artists\u2019 undertaking, but in the end I did it all myself with my own band.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the years passed, Scott continually returned to Yeats\u2019 poems, planting seeds in his imagination and cultivating them until they blossomed. \u201cIf I\u2019d tried to write 15 Yeats adaptations in a year, I would\u2019ve done a slapdash job on it,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I did it without any time constraints, and every few years I would turn another poem into a song. Of course, I was doing lots of other things as well, touring and albums, but I held it in my mind as a project for two decades, and eventually, I had enough adaptations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scott is far from the first musician to set Yeats\u2019 poetry to music; hundreds have tried, though few have managed to create such elegantly seamless marriages of music and language. \u201cI went on iTunes, did a Sherlock Holmes job and found over 300 interpretations of his poems \u2014 I bought them all as well,\u201d Scott says with a laugh. \u201cMy favorite ones are when people bring something fresh and powerful to the task.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that is precisely what Mike Scott and the Waterboys have done on this rhapsodic and revelatory labor of love. <\/p>\n
Mike Scott will be appearing in the Northeastern U.S. in November 2012 for a one-hour reading selected from Adventures of a Waterboy followed by a 40-minute acoustic set with Waterboys fiddler Steve Wickham. The musical selections will be from the Waterboys’ long history and will also feature a preview of songs from An Appointment With Mr. Yeats.<\/p>\n
ADVENTURES OF A WATERBOY READING\/PERFORMANCE DATES AT PRESS TIME:
Sun., Nov. 11 PHILADELPHIA, PA World Cafe Live,
Tues., Nov. 13 NEW YORK, NY Rockwood Music Hall SOLD OUT
Thurs., Nov. 14 NEW YORK, NY Rockwood Music Hall
Sun., Nov. 18 ALLSTON, MA Brighton Music Hall
Mon., Nov. 19 BROOKLYN, NY Williamsburg Music Hall<\/p>\n
MIKE SCOTT AND THE WATERBOYS \u201cAN APPOINTMENT WITH MR. YEATS\u201d U.S. PREMIERE:
Wed., March 20, 2013 NEW YORK, NY Town Hall<\/p>\n
Source: http:\/\/www.mikescottwaterboys.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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