Good Luck, Seeker is the third from Mike Scott and his current lineup of The Waterboys, their 14th overall, and follows 2017’s Out of the Blue and 2019’s Where the Action Is and like those, draws even more heavily on earlier Waterboys and Scott solo material. At times, the full band is revved up in rock mode and at others the poet Scott holds court over ethereal backdrops with dramatic spoken-word passages.
Most of The Waterboys’ styles, culled over four decades, are represented here, even the “Big Music” years. Echoes of albums like A Pagan Place, Fisherman’s Blues, 1993’s Dream Harder, 2000’s A Rock in a Weary Land and 2011’s An Appointment with Mr. Yeats factor in. Nonetheless, Scott has little left to prove. He continues to show why he’s been one of the best songwriters in the past four decades and again, despite what at times feels like a curious mix, he delivers the kind of gems that only he can. Scott has few, if any peers, at delivering half-sung, half-spoken word passages with dramatic flair. His musical mind is essentially boundaryless too – everything from traditional British Isles folk fare to punk, horn-infused R&B, hip-hop, funk, and amped-up rock. It’s all fair game to him. He loves to defy genres and certainly does that here. Let’s get into it.
Mike Scott essentially made Good Luck, Seeker, cooked up in his Dublin home studio where he has been spending lockdown. Scott sent tracks back and forth between band members (keyboardist Brother Paul Brown, fiddler Steve Wickham and drummer Ralph Salmins), who add parts in their own home studios for Scott to manipulate further. “I’m like a kid in a toy shop, I’m having fun all the time. This album was almost accidental. I was just making music, and suddenly realized I’d made an album.” From the exuberant opening blast of the horns blaring “The Soul Singer” to the elegiac closing dream of ‘The Land Of Sunset’, it is an album that draws together many glistening strands of The Waterboys weird and wondrous journey. The imaginative Scott populated these 14 songs with unrepentant freaks, soul legends, outlaw Hollywood film stars and 20th Century mystics while drawing inspiration from The Rolling Stones, Kate Bush, Sly and Kendrick,
There are some new sounds too. The already released single, “The Soul Singer,” sounds like virtually nothing else in the band’s catalog except faint traces that are heard on Out of the Blue. It’s an affectionate portrait of a legendary frontman, “Poet Prince of the high trapeze / The Jazzmatazz, the King Swinger!” Listeners can make up their own minds about the identity of the “old gunslinger” who’s “done crazy, he’s suffered loss / For the life he’s lived he’s paid a cost.” “I can never say who it’s about but there are clues in the lyrics,” notes Scott. Add this one to Scott’s many ongoing songs about the cultural figures who have shaped his world, which have included ‘Has Anybody Here Seen Hank’ (from Fisherman’s Blues), ‘The Return of Jimi Hendrix’ (from Dream Harder) and ‘London Mick’ (his tribute to Clash guitarist Mick Jones on Where The Action Is). He gives a nod to the Rolling Stones on the instrumental “Sticky Fingers” and pays homage to a late, great filmmaker on the rollicking “Dennis Hopper,” one this writer heard performed live last Fall. It’s not a favorite musically but it does have some clever lyrics.
There’s a powerful, heartfelt rendition of Kate Bush’s “Why Should I Love You” (from 1993’s The Red Shoes). Although Scott had recorded it before on a compilation album, he retrieved the multitrack, redid the vocal, added lead guitars, kept some parts and added others, making it essentially a collaboration between himself in 1997 and 2020. This, according to Scott, is the joy of home recording that links his most recent three albums. “They share an identity, like a triptych. They are built on drum loops, and I can take music from all over, play around with them, put on sound effects, do segues and mash-ups.” Hearkening back to the early Waterboys sound on “Low Down In The Broom,” a standout track, he takes a traditional Scottish folk song and creates one more dramatically visceral.
The second half of the album (thinking in terms of vinyl records, as Scott still does) blends instrumentals with spoken word on a journey into the mystic. You may have already gotten a taste of this from the album’s first single,
“My Wanderings In The Weary Land,” which will seem familiar to diehard fans. The backing track was developed from “The Return Of Jimi Hendrix’, which Scott rearranged and re-recorded as a demo for the band before their 2015 tour with an uptown Motown rhythm. Scott had been looking for a way to use it for the past five years before stumbling across the sleeve notes he wrote for A Rock In A Weary Land and started reciting them over the instrumental track. Scott found other pieces of music and text that worked together.
The title track is based around an instrumental by a contemporary Northumbrian folk group, The Unthanks turned backwards and with a hip-hop drumbeat that suddenly transformed into this magnificent pastoral psychedelic piece.” Over it, Scott recited a passage from a book by Dion Fortune, British occultist and author of the early 20th century, co-founder of the Fraternity of the Inner Light. “I love her writing very much. The spiritual journey doesn’t have to be a po-faced one. I’m reciting as a character based on Sir George Trevelyan, an old school fruity-voiced English mystical teacher.” As this writer reflects on statements like these, it recalls a conversation I had with Brother Paul Brown, admiring Scott’s articulation in his vocal delivery, to which Paul replied, “Yes, it’s amazing the way he delivers the lyrics…like no one else.”
“Beauty In Repetition” is drawn from the writings of American psychologist and philosopher William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience. “The Golden Work” is adapted from the writings of another English mystic, Charles Williams, a friend of CS Lewis and Tolkein. Yet, other pieces feature original Mike Scott lyrics. “The Land Of Sunset” is a narrative built around an organ instrumental by Irish musician Peader O Riada, whilst “Everchanging” is set to a further twist on the Hendrix/Weary Land instrumental, showcasing “Brother Paul’s monster keyboard riff.” The atmospheric “Postcard From The Celtic Dreamtime” dates to 1988 when Scott was composing the songs that would become Fisherman’s Blues. “
As stated this album began as a studio experiment of sorts and in that sense, it’s uneven as one might expect as it’s a combination of some new approaches and the re-channeling of prior work. Yet, for every tune one may skip or not latch on to, brilliance is found on the next track or two. Scott says, “I think the next time we will we get on the road, virus willing, will be the summer of 2021. This record will be almost a year old by then, but that’s OK. People will want to see The Waterboys, we will want to tour, and there’s a bunch of songs on this record that are going to be great live.” Nevertheless, he suspects it is the beginning of the end of this phase. “I do feel this was a particular threesome of albums. The next one will be something quite different. It’s written already.” This writer, one of those ‘diehard fans’ referenced earlier, would welcome a return to their more organic full band sound but will defer to Scott’s journey-filled imagination. In the meantime, he provides some needed sustenance in these weary times.
One Response
Best review of this album. Nice one.