Mike Scott of The Waterboys: The Ballad of Dennis Hopper
The mastermind behind 'The Whole of the Moon' discusses his four-year journey writing and recording an ambitious musical biography that chronicles Hopper's artistic triumphs, spectacular flameouts, and ultimate redemption.
Today, the Spotlight shines On founder of The Waterboys, Mike Scott.
In 2014, Mike stumbled upon Dennis Hopper's photography in a London gallery and fell into a rabbit hole that led to Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, a bold concept album that tells the story of the Easy Rider star from childhood to beyond the grave. It's a sonic movie with guest turns from Bruce Springsteen, Fiona Apple, and Steve Earle that chronicles not just Hopper's journey but the cultural shifts he witnessed and helped create.
This marks a new peak in Mike's ever-changing four-decade career with The Waterboys, from their 'Big Music' beginnings to Celtic folk explorations and genre-blending surprises to come.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from The Waterboys' album Life, Death and Dennis Hopper)
Dig Deeper
• Purchase The Waterboys' Life, Death and Dennis Hopper from Sun Records or Qobuz, and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Follow The Waterboys on Patreon, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
• Dennis Hopper's Lost Album: life both sides of the lens
• In pictures: Dennis Hopper photography
• Dennis Hopper Interviews (book)
• Dennis Hopper on Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause)
• A Legacy Went Searching for a Film… Dennis Hopper and Easy Rider
• The Last Movie: Dennis Hopper's Curiously Frustrating Experiment
• Out On Open Seas: The Enduring Mystique Of The Waterboys' Fisherman's Blues
• Fiona Apple - "The Whole of the Moon"
• Motorpsycho
• Dennis Hopper's Gravesite
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I've been immersed in the world of Mike Scott and Dennis Hopper for the last few days, so I'm open. But you've been immersed in that world for the better part of a decade to one degree or another.
Mike Scott: Well, four years making the record certainly.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Mike: Yes.
Lawrence: It almost seems like a method acting approach to making music. I'm really curious about your channeling of another personality that way, and if it's different from how you normally write. I understand it's story-driven music, or you're telling tales and songs, so there's always an element of character, but what's it like to have an extended narrative like that?
Mike: It was really wonderful to work on it, and it was such a lot of fun. In the last 15 years or so, I've done a lot of spoken word tracks. A few of them have been in Waterboys records, but unbeknownst to anyone I've been slowly building up a spoken word comedy record, which probably won't come out under the Waterboys name because Waterboys fans would probably be so cross with me for doing it.
But it will come out in some way and it is full of me playing parts of characters. So inhabiting a role while recording is something that I've been doing more of and getting very at home doing, and doing it on the Dennis album, I do on half a dozen of the tracks. I think there's a couple of spoken memories of Monterey. I'm the character in the Path Movie Tour news character in "Transcendental Brewing Blues." I'm the Freaks On Wheels guy and so on, and I do love doing those. I'm Dennis a couple of times as well, and in "Frank," the track with the f-word as almost the sole lyric, it's me being Dennis, being Frank, the character in Blue Velvet so it's a double act.
Lawrence: I know you've told it before, but just to level set for my listeners, our listeners—tell the genesis of your sort of, for lack of a better way to say it, your fascination with Dennis.
Mike: Well, I was in London, it was in 2014. I was on Savile Row, which is the street with all the tailors. And I was probably browsing at shirts or jackets or something. I do from time to time wander down Savile Row. When I got to the bottom of Savile Row, there's a very big art gallery called the Royal Academy, and I was passing its window and it had a poster for something called "The Lost Album" by Dennis Hopper.
And I was doubly confused because "Lost Album" sounded like a record album. And then Dennis Hopper, he wasn't a musician and yet this is an art gallery, so was he a painter? Well, I walked in to find out, and of course it was an exhibition of Dennis's photography, and I had no idea that he was a photographer, let alone a great photographer.
And so I walked around this exhibition soaking up these hundreds of beautiful black and white images that captured the spirit and the events and the personalities of the 1960s, particularly around California. And I was really drawn into Dennis's world. Those photographs found me from a completely fresh perspective.
I had no preconceptions about Dennis's photography. If I'd even planned to go, I might have had some expectations, but because I just walked in off the street, the photographs just hit me, bang, bang, bang. I became fascinated by Dennis, and there was something about the photography, the way that he seemed to capture people's spirits and moments in time.
And also why was it only 1961 to 1967? Why were there no photographs after 1967? It was fascinating. So I started reading biographies of Dennis and I bought myself a book called Dennis Hopper Interviews, which went right through his career and quickly, I learned all about Dennis's life and of course what I began to realize was how present he was at so many hinge moments in the development of popular and youth culture from its Big Bang, really, when he acted with James Dean in Rebel without a Cause, right through the fifties, sixties, and seventies.
Lawrence: Something that is very striking to me about the project is there's a few elements that I'm still metabolizing, but that really bowled me over. One is the fact that as a listener, if you had no context for it and you just put it on, it's like, man, what a vital, vibrant rock and roll album for the 21st century. We don't get a lot of those anymore. Okay. Big rock. Play it loud, you know.
Mike: Thank you.
Lawrence: But also, and I hope this isn't an offensive way to say it, there's also an adult element to it. Like this is adult rock and roll. It's got balls, but it's so musically adventurous. So I find I just, as a listener, I find that exciting. It's like rock and roll for the 21st century is always a big question mark to me. Like, where does it go? Where is it at? What's it doing? I love the stylistic integrations and the explorations you take. But where it's relevant to the life of Hopper, I think is that there's a real parallel in the music. And you know, if the aliens came down and said, we need the quick primer on post-World War II American or Western Pop culture, you might say, oh, track Dennis Hopper's life, because he was there. And the music in this record does something very similar. There's all these different touchstones. And I'm curious as an artist, especially since you know that story you just told, it was so much about happenstance. Did you sit down and make a map? How did you reign in the ambition? Could you talk about sort of process a little bit versus like the organic nature?
Mike: My interest in Dennis developed as I read the various biographies, and as I began to piece together the whole picture of his life and his career.
And I found that I liked him. He could do really stupid things, and sometimes success went to his head and he would make all these ridiculous quotes, like, "we're gonna be the most creative generation in 2000 years." But he was lovable even at his most hubristic. So I felt I liked him. And it was natural for me to write a song about him because I often write songs about people that I like and people who I find fascinating. You know, I wrote a song about Hank Williams. I've got a song about Elvis.
And so it was easy to write a song about Dennis and very good fun. It came out in an album about five years ago. It was just called "Dennis Hopper." And every line rhymed with the word hopper, which was a nice songwriting challenge for me. But I wasn't finished clearly, and I don't know how much of the story you know, but my band members recorded some instrumentals and sent them to me in a zip folder with a note saying "and you put lyrics to these." And just when I was thinking about Dennis and reading about Dennis, the lyrics came out as Dennis Hopper biographical histories, and I think the first one that came out in that way was "Hopper's on Top" when he's at his peak, when he's just at the success with Easy Rider.
And then another one happened and another one happened, and suddenly I'm looking at these songs, thinking, what am I gonna do with these? It's too much for an EP. And then someone suggested I write an instrumental for each of his five wives. In the end, I didn't write those instrumentals, I asked other people to do it, but suddenly it was looking like an album. And in comic books, when you get the light bulb above the head and it switches on, at some point I must have had that moment and realized it's the album is Dennis Hopper's life story, and after that it was a case of just identifying which episodes belonged in the story.
What episodes did I have to document in order to provide a cohesive account of his, not just his life, but his presence in modern culture.
Lawrence: Because you're telling these different stories across a span of time. And because as you said, you have the different songwriting contributions, some of the different voices, which I wanna ask you about in a moment. It really lends to that feeling for me, again, as a listener. And you may not want to hear any of this as someone who's listening to the record, but it's very reminiscent of like big, sprawling—I thought of like Physical Graffiti—like it just covers so much ground and there's some songs that have this massive grandeur and others just little interludes. It's really in the fine tradition of the ambitious rock album. And I've just been so taken with that over the last couple of days, very unexpected to me to come across something like that in this era.
Mike: Yeah,
Lawrence: It's very special in that regard.
Mike: I think if there's any precedent that influenced me in that way, I don't mean musically influenced, but in terms of the scope of it would've been Tommy and Quadrophenia by the Who.
Lawrence: Yes.
Mike: Because you get these big, massive songs like "See Me, Feel Me," or "Amazing Journey." But you also get "Tommy's Holiday Camp" or in Quadrophenia, you get "Bellboy" and I love that.
Lawrence: It seemed like a real opportunity for you to, for lack of a better way to almost like survey your musical life as well. I mean there are so many of those elements there. There's the bombast of the Who, I can hear the Kinks in there. And then you have some of this almost like show music. And how important is that sort of stylistic panoply to you? It seems to scratch an important itch.
Mike: Well, I like to be free to do whatever kind of music I want. That was in the 1980s, I battled with record companies and managers and even rock journalists and fans to get the right to make the music I wanted to make, to step out of making what people got into like "Big Music" like "The Whole of the Moon," and "This is the Sea." And go into roots music or Americana, or country and western music or Celtic music.
And I feel I won the right to do that and to play any kind of music I want. And anytime people try and put the Waterboys in a box, it's kind of a fool's game. It can't be done. And I've always loved artists like Neil Young or The Beatles or Dylan, who would do the same thing, play whatever kind of music they want.
So it's not so much a new thing for me to do this, but certainly the Hopper record with its span over four decades chronologically in the story, allows for that and allowed me to have a sort of grand slam of all different musical styles, even though I didn't set out to do that. But I noticed quite early on that each song seemed to be taking on the character of the music that was popular at the time of the lyric that I was writing. So when I'm writing about Dennis in 1970, making The Last Movie down in Peru, it came out, I thought it sounded kind of like The Who, that track "Peruvian Blues." When the guitar comes in, it's very Townshend-ian. And once I noticed that, I didn't set out to do it. I didn't think, oh, I'm gonna make it sound like the Who here. It just happened.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Mike: But after I noticed it, I didn't mess with it. I allowed it to be, and I think that was important.
Lawrence: It touches on the metaphysical to hear that, right? It's like there's a very interesting channeling that's going on of time, of place, of personality. It's really fascinating and I don't know what to make of it. (laughter) Something else that's been really interesting as I've learned more about this project is sort of what I'll call like the creative universe you've built around it with the sleeve notes and the short film. It's really a wonderful experience to move through all that and to hear you tell the tales, and some of the anecdotes, and I'm really curious about some of the personal bits about Hopper's struggles around The Last Movie and some of the parallels you've drawn with different parts in your career, specifically around Fisherman's Blues. What was going on for you there? Like what was the recognition that you stumbled across?
Mike: When I first read Dennis's life story and pieced together all the parts, there were three things that reminded me of me. I should say that I don't think me and Dennis Hopper were similar as characters at all. Very, very different personalities. But there were three things that happened in his life that reminded me of myself, and one was when he made The Last Movie, he got bogged down in the editing. He just had his first success and it was as if he couldn't do anything wrong, and yet he got completely dug in and lost his perspective.
And that reminds me of me making Fisherman's Blues in the mid to late 1980s. I had my first little beginnings of success with This is the Sea, not comparable to Easy Rider, but in my world, that was a breakthrough for me. And I won the right with the record company to do whatever I wanted for the next record.
And a bit like Dennis going off to Peru, I went off to Ireland and I made this epic record. And then I got bogged down and lost perspective in the finishing of it. So when I read about Dennis in The Last Movie, I thought, well, it's like me and Fisherman's Blues.
So that was part of it. And then when it went wrong for Dennis and he released The Last Movie and the film studio, I think it was Universal, who were the distributors, they pulled out because they thought it was a failed movie and it flopped and it went bad for Dennis and for a period of time he blamed the movie business. That reminded me of me as well, not with Fisherman's Blues, but when I was very young.
I had a record deal with Virgin Records in London. And we recorded an album and they didn't wanna release it. And I was so upset about that and I blamed the music business for that for about six months of my life with "fucking music business, this fucking music business." Then I realized, well, wait a minute. The record wasn't very good. It was partly my own fault.
I kept doing what the producer told me I shouldn't do. Maybe I've got something to learn. And so I grew out of it in the same way that Dennis did, but it reminded me of myself and I thought, God, I know how that feels. I know how Dennis felt when that happened. Now there's a third thing that happened to him and I can't, for the life of me remember what it was that reminded me of me. So maybe it'll come back to me during the interview. I know there were three things. I just can't remember what the other one was.
Lawrence: As you relate that story or those anecdotes, there's something almost universal there, right? In terms of the artist who has the big success and then has earned the right to do it their way. And it seems like almost invariably when they're given that freedom, and you see it in film and music and I'm sure in other fields, so what is it about the artistic temperament. Is it the lack of people telling them no? Is it tunnel vision? Can you talk about what you think is happening there?
Mike: I think more than anything else is the lack of people telling them no. I know from my own situation when I made the first few Waterboys records, I had a relationship with the record company that was very fractious. We were always arguing. We would never agree about which songs should go in the album and how they should be finished.
But out of the fighting, the albums emerged, and by arguing with me, the record company showed me as much what I didn't want, which revealed to me what I did want, and so it was a very productive process. When that tension is removed and suddenly the artist has a hundred percent right to do whatever they want, and there are no guardrails and no limitations, then the artist loses frame of reference.
It's very easy to do. Now, when I work now, I'm 66 years old now, when I make records, there isn't any record company that's gonna tell me what to do and what not to do. But because I'm older and experienced, I know how to maintain perspective and I know when I need to ask people what they think. And I'll send the work in progress to a very experienced former A&R man, which I did with the Dennis Hopper record in fact.
And I'll use what I'm told. I'll take on board what I'm told. So I have these tools for maintaining perspective, but when I was in my mid-twenties making Fisherman's Blues, I didn't have any of that. And it was almost a matter of self-identification that I didn't ask people, and that I found a way to make all my own decisions.
And of course, without any limitations, I quickly ran into trouble. And I think that's definitely what happened with Dennis with The Last Movie.
Lawrence: In terms of the guest vocalists that you have on the record. First of all, like what a curated group of people. Interesting in their Americanness as a bunch. But could you talk a little bit about, were these preexisting relationships or were these folks that you were just inspired to include because of their voices? Like what drew you to each of them individually?
Mike: I already knew Steve Earle and I've played on stage several times with Steve, and we share a manager. So we're quite friendly and he was an easy ask when I wanted someone with an American compositional skillset to write the music for the first track, "Kansas," which Steve also sings. The others—I'd met Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes and I'd met Bruce Springsteen once, but I didn't know them in the same way.
Once I identified that they were the right voices for the specific parts, it was just a case of our manager, who's a chap called Danny Goldberg, who's been around for a very long time and knows all the other managers. This is the wonderful thing, it was his job, his artistry to make the connection with the other managers and put it in such a way that it was attractive to the artists, and they said yes.
Mike: And then Fiona Apple, Fiona sings a song called "Letter from Unknown Girlfriend" on the record, and she turns in this incredibly passionate, painful performance. And I had heard her do a similar job on my song, "The Whole of the Moon" about six years ago on an American cable streaming TV series.
And I was very struck by the power that she brought to that song. She brought to it something that nobody else ever had. When I wrote this song about Dennis, "Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend," she was the voice that I thought of, and again, it was the manager who made the contact. And of course, Fiona and I were in touch directly while she was doing it, and in a very nice way.
But it was the manager who made the contact. And you know, I mentioned a few minutes ago that I played the Hopper record to an old school A&R man at one point. He's a guy called Dave Bates. He was the A&R man among many other acts for Tears For Fears in the 1980s when they did "Shout" and "Everybody Wants To Rule The World."
And he's an old mate of mine. And when I was about halfway through the Hopper album, he asked me what I was up to, and I shared what I was doing and he said, I'd like to hear it. And I sent it to him and his feedback was, he loved the record, but he thought I was doing too many different voices myself.
And he said, "I think you should hand over some of those voices to other artists." And so that led directly to me inviting Bruce Springsteen to contribute and Taylor Goldsmith and by extension Fiona. So that was some very good feedback from Dave Bates.
Lawrence: It's really interesting and, I don't recall if it was in something I read or in the short film that you put together. There were a few moments where I thought there was a real openness and generosity of spirit in some of the comments you made. And one of them was when you didn't quite get into the same detail you just did there, but you talked about how it was a third party who suggested to you that you bring in other vocalists and that you were a little at first, like, "I don't know, I like the way that sounds." But then your comments which I thought was really beautiful, this idea that like, the first voice on the Waterboys record wasn't yours. And how that kind of tickled you, if I'm interpreting what you said correctly.
Mike: Yes, absolutely right. Yes. Yeah, that's, that pleases me greatly. It's that people own the record and they hear Steve Earle—I just love that.
Lawrence: Yeah. And the anecdote around the band bringing you a bunch of music to respond to, you seemed very touched by that.
Mike: I was, you know, it was a complete surprise. Our drummer at the time, he was a chap called Ralph Solomons. He'd been with us for about 10 years. He was one of the top session players in the UK and he's gone back to that life now. We have a new drummer. Ralph at the time, was busy, often working in his home studio, and it was he who invited our bass player and one of our keyboard players to come and do a couple of days recording.
And I think they set it up because they thought, oh, maybe we could do some songwriting with Mike and maybe if we do some nice instrumentals, he'll put lyrics to them.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Mike: It was a wonderful surprise. I'll be grateful forever that they did that.
Lawrence: Were they responding to something that was going on for you? Were you struggling to write or they were just trying to say, let's get a project going?
Mike: No, no. I think it was the latter.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Mike: No, I never had any problems writing—there's always music coming, but they'd noticed that I often co-wrote. I really like co-writing with people, and I think they thought, whoa, he should maybe co-write with us. It's a good call.
Lawrence: There's a certain romanticism of that era that Hopper's adult life encompasses, but there's certainly a dark underbelly through a lot of the eras, right? Whether it's the hippie era turning into the hard drug era or just the way youth culture evolved into—whatever it is we're still dealing with now, as the boomers maintain their places on the stage. What perspective did you come into about that era and has that perspective evolved as you've immersed yourself in so much of the history and the tales?
Mike: It was something I was already immersed in. I'm fascinated by the counterculture and the development of popular culture. And I grew up in the sixties. I was a child in the sixties, and I remember all the events from a 6, 7, 8, 9 year old's perspective. I remember "All You Need Is Love" on the global telecast the night it happened. And I remember Magical Mystery Tour on the TV, the night that it was broadcast, "Hey, Jude," on the TV, the Rolling Stones, then "Jumping Jack Flash" on the television. I remember all these moments with a child's eye.
And so for me, the changes of consciousness and political awareness in the 1960s are something very precious to me. Personal freedoms that were gained. Personal freedoms, for example, for homosexuals or for colored people or for women. And those are crucial, crucial advancements. And building on previous advancements, like political liberation, when everybody got the vote or the freedom of thought and spirituality that's been part of the 20th century.
You know when people were born in the 1890s or the 1990s, they did what their parents did and they worshiped like their parents did, and they were ostracized if they went against that. But now we've got this spiritual independence and freedom to be who we want to be, and that's a wonderful advance or evolution that was made possible by human endeavor in the 20th century. And there are those now who would take that away and they won't succeed because you can't put toothpaste back in the tube. We've had a taste of that freedom and they'd like to take it away in America too.
And I don't think it's gonna work because I spend time sometimes in Asia, and Asia has a group mind culture. Trump admires China. He admires how the Chinese premier has this iron fist control of billions of people. But the Chinese mind is different from the American mind. It's more of a group mind.
The American mind is a mind that has arisen through independence and freedom and will not take kindly to attempts to marshal it like that. So Trump will fail. So I have been interested in these developments and the counterculture and popular culture as a vehicle for human freedom for a long time.
And I also see that the hippie generation had a lot of flaws built into it. There was still a lot of misogyny in the hippie generation. They weren't exactly good about treating women well. And also in spirituality, it's important when you have spiritual experiences that you integrate them.
Mike: And someone once said that for every year you spend learning spiritually, you have to spend seven years integrating what you've learned and the hippie generation learned a lot spiritually, very, very quickly from about 1965 to 1969 through acid and consciousness enhancing drugs and communal mass experience that was incredibly powerful for them. But because it had been arrived at in large part through drug means and drugs that perhaps could have been taken in a reverent way, but which were mainly taken in a recreational way, they didn't integrate the wisdoms. And so it quickly flipped to a much darker expression.
And that's how you get that great quote of David Crosby's: "We were all gonna hold hands and sing to God. And we ended up with guns outside the drug dealer's door." The darkness of the sixties, the late sixties and Manson and Altamont and all that. But I don't think that undoes the greater gains of that period, the consciousness gains and the personal freedom gains of that period.
And I think we're still learning from that time and still exploring the breaking of limitations that came then. It's in the information technology, it's in the weird information-rich information saturated society that we're in now.
Lawrence: No, that's, I mean you're speaking to a lot of things that are smack dab in my sort of lifelong areas of interest as well, especially that intersection of information technology and our spiritual lives and the metaphysical implications of what we've built through this rapidly connected information world, but it also, as we're sort of in real time living with the repercussions of the speed of the transformation, it reminds me a lot of what you just said about that '65 to '69 period, which is our transformations right now are so rapid. It's near impossible to integrate them in a meaningful way. We're just reacting.
Mike: I guess it will happen. I think humanity is a sturdy beast. I think we'll be all right. But it could take time and some of it won't be pretty.
Lawrence: Well, the word sturdy, it speaks to something else I wanted to ask you, which is Hopper had these cycles, which most humans do, and certainly most artists do, of massive success, deep failure, commercially, artistically, however you wanna say it. And I'm curious, did you draw lessons of artistic resilience from his story or had you learned those lessons already?
Mike: I suppose I've learned some of those lessons already, but Dennis is a very good example. He burned out for about 10 years after his failure with The Last Movie, but he still came back. It's so wonderful. He came back, he got himself straight. I say straight, I think he was a pot smoker till the end of his days. But he swore off drink and hard drugs, and he turned himself into a reliable elder of Hollywood. It's really an incredible transformation. He really came back from the brink and that's, I find that very inspiring, very lovable as well. I see pictures of him, in his later days, sparkling eyes, a twinkle in his eye. So wonderful.
Lawrence: Did you learn much about what his, what the spiritual component of his life was?
Mike: No, and I'm not sure there was a whole lot of spiritual component, as you put it. He wasn't a big reader, for example.
Lawrence: That surprises me.
Mike: He was not a big reader. He would talk about film and art, but never a big reader. And as far as I know, never involved in any particular spiritual discipline or religion or system. There's no Buddhism in there, no spiritual practice that I can find—his art was a spiritual practice, I think.
Lawrence: There was a quote of yours about the album capturing the whole strange adventure of being a human soul on planet Earth.
Mike: Mm-hmm.
Lawrence: I mean, that's quite a mouthful—it's so soulful. What were you most interested in illuminating? What aspects of those experiences are you, what excites you artistically when you think about sort of the human condition?
Mike: I never think about it like that, is what excites me most. And with making the Hopper record, I just noticed that I got to say a lot in the songs about what it's like to be alive, like at the end of "Golf," man or woman looks back cold and weighs the work that's done.
Lawrence: Hmm.
Mike: I think storytelling has that power to touch into the larger story of humanity and I think, toward the end of working on this Hopper record, I realized that I'd done a bit of that, and that's really what that quote refers to.
You know, that we are at the start of the record—even though we know now that he could never really lose the Kansas that was inside of him when he was a kid, he just wanted to get away from Kansas and leave it. And that's so much a normal human condition to be able to escape and transcend your background and where you came from and invent yourself.
Lawrence: It was so powerful in the short film when you went to his grave. I had no idea, I mean, that was so unexpected. That such a humble final resting place yet so beautiful.
Mike: Mm, yes indeed. Yes, indeed. A Mexican graveyard.
Lawrence: How did that come to pass, do you know? From what you've read?
Mike: I don't know. I haven't read him saying specifically why he wants to be buried in Taos, but I guess that's where he felt right. He felt it should be his resting place and it's clearly his decision.
Lawrence: It's so fascinating. So you're going to take this project on the road, you're gonna be out plying the stages, as it were. Which means you're gonna live with Dennis Hopper for a while longer and channeling his voice and stories.
Mike: Yes, indeed. Yes. That's no hardship.
Lawrence: At what point do you start to get the—when does the next thing start to germinate? Are you thinking about the next thing?
Mike: I'm already wondering about it. Of course. Yes. Well, I have two projects ready to go. There's an extra album's worth of Hopper rough cuts that didn't make the record that's gonna come out Record Store Day in November called Rips from the Cutting Room Floor. A few of them are alternative versions of tracks that are on the album, but about a dozen of them are actual additional pieces that, for one reason or another, didn't make the cut.
But they're all worthwhile and some of them are very funny. And then, in 2026, we've got an album of Fisherman's Blues music that was forgotten—Fisherman's music from the recording of Fisherman's Blues. In the last year, I've been going back into old tapes that were not marked at the time, and I've been discovering lots of recordings that were forgotten. And they're good as well. So I've put together what's a triple vinyl double CD. It's coming out in April for this time next year. Then I've got some tracks stockpiled for a new album. God only knows what form it'll take or what else I'll write for it. I have no idea. It's some years off, I think.
Lawrence: As the technology's changed over the years that you've been in the music business, and I mean, mostly the formats, the ways you can put out music now, it sounds like—I don't wanna put words in your mouth by asking you to answer this question, but it sounds like you still think in terms of the album as the artistic statement. Is that fair or have you had notions of experimenting with other formats?
Mike: I still think in albums, yeah. And largely, I think in vinyl albums, I still think about side one, side two. And that's partly because that's how I listen to music still as well.
Lawrence: There was a real—I was gonna say problem, but pardon the word, it implies more negativity than I mean. There was a real situation in the CD era where, because of the length of the CD, so many artists felt compelled to fill the 80 minutes.
Mike: Mm-hmm. I know.
Lawrence: There weren't a lot of people that had 80 minutes of music every year. (laughter)
Mike: That's right. That's right.
Lawrence: 40 is okay. Like an album's always seemed like the right length.
Mike: Yeah, I think so too. And to commit to listening to 20 minutes of something when you put a side on, oh, I'll listen to Marvin Gaye for 20 minutes.
Lawrence: Yes, that's right. That's right. Yeah. I love that. Before I let you go, since you mentioned how you listen to music, what might be the next thing you put on? What's in your rotation these days?
Mike: I've been listening to a lot of country rock bands from Trondheim in Norway of all places.
Lawrence: Wow.
Mike: It turns out that Trondheim is an epicenter of country rock music. And I've just received a couple of albums by a band called Motorcycle from Trondheim and I've been listening to those and they're very beautiful.
Lawrence: Wonderful. Thank you for that. It gives me something to explore this weekend.
Mike: Yeah.
Lawrence: Mike, thank you so much. What a great, great record. I'm looking forward to seeing it live this fall when you're here in Seattle. Thank you for your time.
Mike: You are very welcome. Thank you. It was a great pleasure. Have a wonderful weekend.
Lawrence: You too. So long.
Mike Scott
Founder of The Waterboys
The Waterboys, founded by Scottish songwriter, singer and guitarist Mike Scott in 1983, is an ever-changing band with a mercurial history. Their early albums of skyhigh alternative rock/pop include the classic This Is The Sea with its mighty hit The Whole Of the Moon. Since then The Waterboys have evolved through countless forms, playing a music of many genres yet always rooted in Scott's songwriting mastery and a sense of musical exploration. Highlights on the journey include the marriage of rock and folk on Fisherman's Blues and 2011's An Appointment With Mr Yeats, on which the poems of the Irish mage and master WB Yeats were powerfully set to contemporary music. And Scott has been honoured in his time: winner of an Ivor Novello Award for Whole Of the Moon; recipient of the Americana UK Award for lifetime achievement; his songs sung by Prince, U2, Rod Stewart, Ellie Goulding, Tom Jones, The War On Drugs, Killers, Bleachers and countless other artists.
Now comes the most audacious Waterboys album of all. Life, Death And Dennis Hopper is the epic story of the trailblazing American actor and rebel told through a song cycle that depicts not only Hopper's own saga but the sagas of our times and shared culture.
Joined by Waterboys colleagues Brother Paul (organ/keyboards), Famous James (piano/guitar), Aongus Ralston (bass) and Eamon "Rimshot" Ferris (drums), and by brilliant guest collaborators including Bruce Springsteen, Fiona Apple, Steve Earle and young English singer Barny Fletcher, Scott has created an album for the … Read More
