The Waterboys, "Good Luck, Seeker"

The Waterboys, Good Luck, Seeker

Cooking Vinyl, 21 August 2020

The title of The Waterboys’ new album is perfect. Mike Scott has been for decades the dazzling, fleet-footed Golden Snitch of the music world, and this record is both a capsule and capstone showing just how he and his band cannot be pinned down, or confined to any genre.

A confession: I fell in love with Scott’s beautiful and entirely unique voice before I knew who he or The Waterboys were, when I heard “Fisherman’s Blues” on WBCN in Boston in October 1989. At the end of the month, their show at the Orpheum made a fan of me for life, and I’ve followed their long and varied trail of records, with a regularly shifting lineup of performers, ever since. 

Scott, who founded The Waterboys in the early 1980s, and the extraordinary fiddle player (and multi-instrumentalist, composer, artist, and photographer) Steve Wickham, are the longest-standing members of the group. Good Luck, Seeker also boasts the talents of Brother Paul Brown on keyboards, Ralph Salmins on drums, Aongus Ralston on bass, and Zeenie Summers, Jess Kavanagh, and Blaine Harrison on backing vocals. Many other musicians who have been past members of the group — like David Hood, the pride of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, who toured with The Waterboys in 2015 — appear on selected tracks.

Good Luck, Seeker opens with a burst of Motown ripple and funk, “The Soul Singer,” and follows with rather wily whimsy, “(You’ve Got To) Kiss A Frog or Two,” co-written by Scott and Brown. There is a beautiful version of the traditional love song “Low Down in the Broom” that gives way to a snappy, spicy ode to Dennis Hopper. How’s that for diversity? Keep going; there’s more.

Since the summer festival season in this dark year was canceled, and live music, that much-missed visceral part of our lives, remains a thing of the past and future but not the present, it’s a gift that The Waterboys are releasing so many videos of these new songs. Scott is a visual artist as well as a singer-songwriter, interested in everything from collage to sartorial style, and the videos are to me integral interpretations.

There’s “Freak Street,” which showcases Scott’s spectacular sneer:

The dark-haired lady of “Low Down In The Broom” is certainly not sitting around and waiting for any lover:

My favorite of the videos for Good Luck, Seeker, so far is that for the spoken-word lyric “Postcard From the Celtic Dreamtime.” Some years ago The Waterboys did an album, and live performance at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, called An Appointment With Mr, Yeats. Yeats’s beloved landscape in The West belongs to The Waterboys as well, and has, since their days of recording in Spiddal long ago. “Postcard From the Celtic Dreamtime” sweeps you over the Aran Islands and what remains of the ancient, magnificent cliffside fort of Dun Aengus — half of it now bitten away by time, the wind and the sea.

 Pick up Good Luck, Seeker and enjoy your trip away from what you think you know. The familiar is reinterpreted; the new is exciting; and all of it lightens the heaviness of the looming ending of the longest year.

Steve Wickham and Mike Scott, Patchin Place, New York City, 2015.