Mike Scott is pop’s only literate lyricist who would dare take on the stately iconography of William Butler Yeats. Forget about the living proof provided by his band the Waterboys as they tackle the Irishman’s prickly poems through a series of 14 daringly diverse arrangements on the new An Appointment With Mr. Yeats (Proper American). You’d know that if you’ve listened to Scott’s richly robust catalog of Waterboys albums made since 1983, or even read his recently released book, Adventures Of A Waterboy. Though imbued with an intellectual curiosity beyond that of the most wizened scholar, Scott has long found himself inspired by Yeats’ vivid world-weary lyrical textures and smartly grammatical manner. On the other hand, he’s a big Twitter fan. Go figure. Scott will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Q&A with him.
I love opening Apple’s GarageBand program on my computer and mashing up favourite bits of music. Before every Waterboys tour, I compile a pre-show mix, all instrumental tracks cherry-picked from my record collection, most of them specially mashed and edited. I burn the resulting 75 minute supermash and give it to our soundman, with an instruction to play it loud. Beatles and Stones music, soul, spaghetti-Western soundtracks, French pop and Egyptian jazz are all rich seams of mashable sound, and I’ve mined them all, and may other things besides. One time I looped the drum groove from “Tomorrow Never Knows” and synched it to a barnbstorming Irish reel by the great Galway trad combo De Dannan. Another time I turned every individual note on Bach’s Air In A G String backwards, one at a time, to get the correct melody as if played by a Venusian. And one of my favourite tricks is to reverse a track then let the backwards version run alongside the forwards version, only slightly quieter, which produces a magickal undergrowth of sympathetic yet weird sound.
In the first mash I’ve picked for you, I took instrumental sections of the Stones’ 1968 track “Street Fighting Man,” edited them together and wove in Beatles sound effects, the final orchestral chord from Bowie’s immortal “Rock & Roll Suicide” and some random jazz drumming to make an 80-second bonkers stramash. I hope you’ll play it about as loud as my concert soundman.
The second is the meticulously concocted backwards Bach.
Audio after the jump.
“Street Fighting Dude”
“Backwards Bach”
One reply on “From The Desk Of The Waterboys’ Mike Scott: Mashing It Up”
Thanks, Mike for identifying what I was hearing before the show at Town Hall last week. I was rather enjoying it and wondered what it was. Neat!