Written by: Paul Gleason

I came to Fisherman’s Blues in 1988, when I was an impressionable 15-year-old in thrall to everything U2 said, played, or did. The larger-than-life, black-and-white images of the band in Rattle and Hum filled the autumn-night movie houses, and Bono’s incensed anti-war speech and The Edge’s fiery guitar playing on “Sunday Bloody Sunday” helped me understand art as passion—passion as emotion, passion as desire, passion as enthusiasm, and passion as suffering.

That same autumn, consumed by U2’s grandiose vision, I purchased Fisherman’s Blues based on the recommendation of—if I remember correctly—both Bono and The Edge in Rolling Stone.

But I didn’t know then what I know now. U2 wrote Rattle and Hum and some of the songs on The Joshua Tree partially as a result of their friendship with The Waterboys and, more particularly, with Mike Scott, whose passion—in all the meanings of the word mentioned above—for roots music was contagious.

Fisherman’s Box tells the story of Mike’s passion and, in so doing, the creation of Fisherman’s Blues over the course of seven compact discs, a re-mastered vinyl copy of the finished album, an introduction written by Colin Meloy of The Decemberists, a slew of terrific photographs, and Mike’s insightful track-by-track commentary.

But these are just the facts, and they skip the passion that drove Mike and his collaborators in The Waterboys to make Fisherman’s Blues, which came out in 1988.

In September of 1985, The Waterboys released their third and most successful album to date—This Is the Sea—one of those rare records on which every song is a memorable, transformative, and, indeed, a passionate listen. Just begin recollecting the tracks in their running order, and you’ll see what I mean: “Don’t Bang the Drum,” “The Whole of the Moon,” “Spirit,” “The Pan Within”…

Mike could have made a fourth album in this vein, but he’s not that kind of artist. He’s a restless, passionate searcher who decided to change The Waterboys’ sound. He moved to Ireland in 1986 and began focusing on traditional Irish and Scottish music, country music, and rock and roll, pretty much abandoning the gorgeously massive sound of This Is the Sea, A Pagan Place, and The Waterboys.

What I just wrote represents how critics and fans have come to explain Mike’s seemingly sudden decision. But I’d like to posit a different explanation—an explanation that, I think, Fisherman’s Box upholds, namely that Mike’s pursuit of the unfairly deemed “simplicity” of roots music indicates the humility inherent in any spiritual quest.

Fisherman’s Box shows Mike’s humility in its nakedness. Its tracks, which include covers, first attempts at songs Waterboys’ fans have come to cherish in their “finished” forms, false starts, instrumentals, and other sundries, reveal a band that’s unafraid to expose their learning process. Moreover, the six discs of outtakes and single disc of “Fisherman’s Roots” (populated with songs performed by the likes of The Carter Family, Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, De Dannan, and Tomás Mac Eoin) reveal a band discovering a sound—a sound that eventually leads to a the new vision of Fisherman’s Blues.

This Is the Sea ends with Mike’s monumental title track. The multilayered acoustic guitars and fiddle create an enormous sound, which sounds like a wave upon which the spacious vocal melody and lyrics that use simple, archetypal imagery (the river/sea binary) to reveal to listeners the spiritual rebirth that has already occurred inside them—a spiritual rebirth that the song invites them to recognize.

Fisherman’s Box begins in Dublin in January of 1986, with “one of [Mike’s] earliest country music compositions,” “Stranger to Me.” While sounding somewhat like an exercise in learning how to write a country song (the vocal melody smacks of country tradition), the lyrics lean inward. Mike sings about a relationship on the wane; he sings from an inner place. He finds the universal through personal experience and not through the archetypal imagery of “This Is the Sea.” It’s no wonder that the next two tracks—Bob Dylan and Hank Williams tunes, respectively—do the same thing and seek the universal through the feelings of a particular lost love.

All of this paves the way for the earliest versions of “Fisherman’s Blues,” which probably remains The Waterboys’ best-loved song and, in its Fisherman’s Box incarnation, shows its brotherhood with Dylan and Williams. It’s sheer excitement to hear Mike call out the chords and the arrangement, as he plays piano and sings lyrics he’d “had…on a scrap of paper for a couple of months.”

What Mike essentially and brilliantly does here is take the universal, archetypal image of the fisherman casting his line into water—into the endless flow of creativity, as well as the fount life, baptism, and rebirth—and uses it and the power of song to pull himself out of the despondency of “Stranger to Me” and the Dylan and Williams tunes. The song is about the miracle of creativity, so it’s especially thrilling to hear it in the moment of creation. It’s rebirth for both Mike and his band.

According to Mike, “five minutes later [he] switched to twelve string acoustic guitar and [the band] played the definitive version,” the one that is the title and opening track of Fisherman’s Blues. What’s key is that Mike speaks in the first-person, describing his own spiritual rebirth from the inside. He’s no longer the poet-prophet of “This Is the Sea”; he’s a man with the courage to be utterly himself.

I can’t possibly cover all the riches on Fisherman’s Box in one short review, so I’ll jump ahead in time to the end of the sessions, which took place in Dublin and Spiddal, from 30 March to 2 June 1988. The box includes two of the three fiddle solos that the band recorded for “When Ye Go Away”—a song whose odd, simple, beautiful, and almost modal chord progression has always fascinated me—and demonstrates how the choice of a fiddle solo can change the meaning of a song.

First up is the version that we all know from Fisherman’s Blues. Charlie Lennon, who shares a composition credit with Mike for the song, plays his fiddle in a way that grounds in traditional Irish music the mystical modal chord progression and the almost psychedelic vocal melody. Whereas it creates a perfect balance between the past and the progressive, Frankie Gavin’s unused solo is more experimental. My hunch is that Mike decided to go with Charlie’s because he wanted each song on Fisherman’s Blues to be consistently grounded in roots music. It’s a shame that the set doesn’t include Steve’s solo.

Fisherman’s Box is inspirational because it provides insight into one man’s search to find himself. This man could be Mike Scott. This man could be you. This man could even be me. But one thing’s for sure—this man is all of us as we journey through our lives under the auspices of grace, love, humility, and, above all, passion.