This, says Mike Scott, is the 76th interview he has done about The Waterboys' new album, Modern Blues. You can be sure that he also has the number in his head of the questions that have been repeated. And, yeah, he naturally wants to get to 100 interviews. That competitive streak will re-emerge later in this conversation.
You could call Modern Blues Scott's Nashville album, seeing as it was recorded in Music City. Like much of The Waterboys' music over the years, it looks west, an album full of road music and snaking grooves, adding a loose soul vibe to the rock'n'roll, blues, folk and punk that have long caught Scott's attention.
There is a prosaic reason why Scott headed to Nashville for this album: the studios he wanted to use were still there. “There’s still a studio scene in Nashville which has been lost over here,” he says. “You’ll still find big rooms where an entire band can go in and play together and the engineers are not fazed by that.
“If I went into a studio in London and said I was going to sing at the same time as the band were playing, I’d be looked at as if I’d just landed from Mars. In America, it’s ‘Where do you want to sit?’ and away we go.”
Don't take this to mean that the band clocked up weeks in the studio, however. "Budgets were tight because we were paying for everything ourselves," says Scott. "It was profits from the Fisherman's Blues Revisited tour which paid for the album, and we didn't take it to a label until it was finished. I couldn't afford to spend a lot of time experimenting, so I'd all the songs selected, fully demo-ed and arranged so we could hit the ground running. There are no out-takes. There won't be a box-set this time."
Another reason for the trip to the US was that Scott had acquired a taste for playing with an American band after a 2013 tour. “It’s that swagger. There’s a looseness in the playing and a first-hand quality. Our keyboard player, Brother Paul, is from Memphis and he plays soul gospel keyboard in that way because he grew up in that culture. He hasn’t been in Britain or Ireland studying it from afar. He is it; he’s in the stream of it. I like that quality.”
Scott says it was a re-reading of Jack Kerouac's On the Road that fired up his imagination when it came to some of the lyrical themes on the album. "I'd just re-read it in the original scroll edition and that inspired me all over again, which is why there are a lot of road songs on the album.
“I’ve re-read it now four or five times and I find it more of a wonder that it got written as I grow older and the world that it describes gets further and further away, and that sense of wonder at the world seems to get further and further away. It’s such a bitter-sweet experience.”
A prolific period
Modern Blues comes on the back of a hugely prolific period for Scott. There were the An Appointment With Mr Yeats live shows; albums in 2010 and 2011; his fantastic memoir Adventures of a Waterboy in 2012; and a lengthy trawl through the Fisherman's Blues archives for the expansive box set of out-takes in 2013. Add in a healthy run of live shows and Scott's productivity is commendable.
“Part of it is down to living in Dublin again,” he says. “I lived here from 1986 to 1991 and I loved it so much here. I missed it when I left. All the time when I was in New York and London and back in Scotland, I always missed Dublin. Every time I came here, I wondered why I wasn’t living here. Finally, I got back and I find it so creative here. That’s definitely part of it.
“The imagination is much different to the British imagination, and it’s a more spacious place. Of course, it also has had its bad side: the creativity of the cute hoor.
“But I find it a good place to write. That’s the definition for me: can I write songs there? Dublin’s great for writing songs compared to some of the places I’ve lived and I don’t really know why. It’s not like there’s a huge music scene here. I like the music scene here – but there’s a much bigger music scene in New York and I don’t write so well in New York.”
Musical antennae
Scott's musical antennae remain well tuned; he is currently digging Natalie Prass's new album and revisiting Isaac Hayes's Black Moses. He has also become an avid Twitter user.
“I don’t listen to the radio and I don’t read the music press much, but I am always clocking what people are talking about online, so I’m forever listening to new music and buying records. I love Twitter; I like discussing stuff which is going on. It sometimes gets me into trouble and I’ll get into an argument with people. I love it when peace breaks out again.
"Sometimes I'll unfollow people if they keep getting into fights. Jessica Valenti from the Guardian is fantastic, she's a feminist and her articles are brilliant, but I had to unfollow her because she kept fighting with trolls and right-wingers. I can't get pulled into that. Owen Jones from the Guardian is a great journalist, but he is so angry about things that I unfollowed him because I'm getting burned out reading his tweets. I'll keep reading his articles, though.
“George Monbiot, on the other hand, is angry, but he doesn’t just spew it out in his tweets. He’s creative with it, he’s articulate with it, he takes you to his article, he doesn’t just vent.”
When it comes to his own work, it’s a “competitive streak” that drives Scott on. “I see he has an album out, I want to do better than him,” he says about this compulsion. “I write better songs than him. I want to release an album which is better than his one. When I do a festival, it really matters to me that more people are watching us than are watching the other band. I really care about stuff like that. It won’t keep me awake at night, but at the time, it matters.”
Who are the acts he’s seeking to outdo? “With songwriting, Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen are the two I really think are great. Dylan is still a great songwriter, but he’s very dry and end-of-the-world, which I find heavy going.
“All that dialogue is going on all the time, that competitive streak. That’s in my head. I’m hungry and so competitive. But I don’t want them to do badly. I don’t want to do well because they do badly. I want them to do well, but I want to outdo them.”
