Written by: Paul Gleason

By Paul Gleason

Mike Scott cuts through – and seeing him perform live with The Waterboys at Milwaukee’s Turner Hall Ballroom on Wednesday, October 16, reminded me why this is the case. He makes mystical and timeless music, music that mingles with the ether, its immortality making usually derogatory, temporal words like “nostalgia” totally irrelevant.

When The Waterboys began their set with “Strange Boat” and “Fisherman’s Blues”—two key cuts from their 1988 masterpiece Fisherman’s Blues—they lifted me up on a spiritual wave that made time stop. Suddenly, I was back in my college dorm room, playing those very songs with my college band and feeling Scott’s beautiful words passing from my from my throat, through my mouth, and into the Madison air.

These tunes get at the essence of Scott’s lifelong project—to make you feel at home in and appreciative of your life, which, he teaches you, is a mysterious gift. Opening the Milwaukee show with “Strange Boat”—the opening lines of which run, “We’re sailing in a strange boat / Heading for a strange shore”—to the warmth of Steve Wickham’s fiddle accompaniment made you feel at home in life’s mystery, a mystery that asks nothing of you but to bathe in it and feel yourself as part of its divinity.

This mystery erases time. It can put you back in your college dorm room with your first band, it put you on the living room floor playing with your twin girls, it can help see you through hospital stays and the deaths of loved ones…

It’s no wonder, then, that The Waterboys performed the song that could be their thesis: “Spirit,” from their 1985 masterpiece This Is the Sea. When Scott sang to his own keyboard accompaniment, “Man is tethered / Spirit is free / What spirit is man can be,” he revealed the gist of The Waterboys’ project: to make music that, as I said above, encourages and inspires you to see your life as something timeless, something greater than the body that you currently inhabit.

“Tethered”—this word is crucial to Scott because the Irish poet W.B. Yeats used a similar word to describe humanity’s relationship to the body. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats addresses the medieval sages of Byzantium, “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is; and gather me / Into the artifice of eternity.” Yeats wants to escape his body and become a great work of art—an “artifice of eternity”—that’s timeless in its ability to speak to the past, the present, and the future.

Scott uses the word “tethered” in much the same way that Yeats uses “fastened.” A great song, poem, or any work of art is spirit because it only works when it’s beheld and—so to speak—animated in the soul.

Because Scott has studied and understood the lessons of Yeats, his musical settings of Yeats’s poems made perfect sense not only in the context of the Milwaukee gig but in the context of The Waterboys’ records.

The band only played a few songs from their album of Yeats’s musical settings—2011’s An Appointment with Mr. Yeats—but the tunes that they chose mattered. “Song of Wandering Aengus” demonstrated the importance of Yeats’s early mystical and Romantic poems to the band, whereas “White Birds” was a lovely rendering of what Scott called the poet’s most beautiful love song.

But what really hit home was the performance of “Mad as the Mist and Snow,” to which Scott appended a recitation of “The Second Coming.” The former poem deals with the myth of the poet’s and philosopher’s madness—in this case, Homer, Cicero, Plato, and Tully—and The Waterboys sonically replicated this madness by cranking up their instruments to create a shuddering wall of sound. Some of the band members wore masks—in homage to Yeats’s theory of the mask, which posits that poets adopt personae to don public images that liberate them to write about impersonal, mythic, and universal truth (he gets the idea from Japanese Noh theater and the theater of ancient Athens)—and Scott’s was particularly prevalent when he recited “The Second Coming,” whose apocalyptic meditations reflect the chaos and violence of our times. It was obvious that Scott felt that Yeats had found a universal truth in this poem.

The show also included a bevy of Waterboys’ classics such as the lovely “When Ye Go Away,” the gorgeous “The Whole of the Moon,” and rockers like “Don’t Bang the Drum” and “We Will Not Be Lovers.” And Wickham shone in the encore with an unexpected and uplifting performance of “Dunford’s Fancy.”

Seeing Scott and The Waterboys play at Turner Hall was a true trip—in the words of Van Morrison, another one of Scott’s heroes—“into the mystic.” I wish you all could have been there.