This Is the Sea is the third studio album by the Waterboys, released on 16 September 1985 by Ensign Records. The last of their "Big Music" albums, it is considered by critics to be the finest album of the Waterboys' early rock-oriented sound, described as "epic" and "a defining moment". It peaked at number 37 in the UK Albums Chart. Steve Wickham makes his Waterboys recording debut playing violin on "The Pan Within" and subsequently joined the band. This Is the Sea is the last Waterboys album with contributions from Karl Wallinger, who left the group to form his own band, World Party.

The album was recorded between March and July 1985, and released that October. Mike Scott, the album's principal songwriter and leader of the Waterboys, describes This Is the Sea as "the record on which I achieved all my youthful musical ambitions", "the final, fully realised expression of the early Waterboys sound", influenced by The Velvet Underground, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, and Steve Reich.

This Is the Sea contains the best-selling Waterboys single, "The Whole of the Moon". The album cover is a photograph taken by Lynn Goldsmith.

A remastered and expanded version was released in 2004. A complete box set of studio recording sessions, demos and live recordings was released as 1985 in 2024, documenting the making of This Is the Sea.

Production history

Scott began writing songs for This Is the Sea in the spring of 1984, beginning with the song "Trumpets". Scott recalls that in December 1984 "during the Waterboys' first American tour, [he] bought two huge hard-bound books... in which to assemble [his] new songs"

The first recording session for This Is the Sea began in March 1985 at Park Gates Studio in Hastings, England with engineer and producer John Brand. Band members Scott, Anthony Thistlethwaite, Karl Wallinger, Chris Whitten, and Roddy Lorimer performed the new material. Wallinger's home studio heard demo recordings for a number of the album's songs. Some of the recordings, like the ones of the last two albums, are relatively untouched by studio engineering. On other recordings, however, Scott added a drum machine and layered the sound, using a studio technique similar to that of the famous record producer Phil Spector, with help from Wallinger. "Having Karl [Wallinger] in the studio", writes Scott, "was like having a one-man orchestra around. There might have been a This Is the Sea without him, but it wouldn't have been the same – or as good".

A remastered version was released in 2004, with a second CD of material from the album's singles, and unreleased tracks from the This Is the Sea recording sessions.

Album promotion

This Is the Sea was promoted heavily and reached number 37 in the UK Albums Chart. Neither of the two preceding albums had charted in the Top 40.

The album was followed by tours in the United Kingdom, and in North America as the headliners. Sinéad O'Connor made her UK live debut as a backing singer on "The Big Music" at a concert at the London Town and Country Club. In December, the Waterboys joined the band Simple Minds for a European tour. During the three major tours, the band's lineup began to change, and the album received more exposure than its two predecessors. Irish musician Bono includes the album on his "top ten" list, noting "In rock, the word 'poet' gets thrown around a lot. Not here..."

"Don't Bang the Drum", the lyrics of which encourage environmentalism, was released as a single in Germany, with a song titled "Ways of Men" as the B-side. The first draft of the song's music was written by Wallinger. Scott reworked the arrangement, changing its rhythm and "feel", but Wallinger's melody and chords were preserved. and was unfinished at the beginning of the recording sessions, eventually being completed in May 1985. AllMusic instead suggests that its subject is actually a number of people who inspired Scott, including Christian writer C. S. Lewis and the musician Prince. Scott himself says that he "couldn't have written" the song without having read Mark Helprin's novel Winter's Tale, but goes on to state that the song is not about Helprin

A feature of "The Whole of the Moon" is the trumpet work on the recording, courtesy of the classically trained Lorimer, who spent three days with Scott working on the song's arrangement. According to Lorimer, he "went home with a tape of the song and thought about a more classical approach. After a while sitting at the piano I came up with the idea of antiphonal trumpets. A piccolo trumpet on the left answered a piccolo on the right and then the same again, growing by adding a Bb trumpet below each side of the stereo picture. Mike [Scott] loved it, except the slightly jazzy chords I had used on the run down at the very end, which he simplified. I used the same classical approach later in the song, mixing two classical-type trumpets behind a later verse." Lorimer also contributes falsetto background vocals to the song, while Thistlethwaite, another brass section member, performs a saxophone solo near the end.

<!-- FAIR USE of The Whole of the Moon The Waterboys 19 sec.ogg: see description page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/filename=The Whole of the Moon The Waterboys 19 sec.ogg for rationale -->

thumb|right|The popularity of "The Whole of the Moon" has created a market for [[copyright infringement|unlicensed copies, such as the above compact disc.]]

<!-- FAIR USE of The_Whole_of_the_Moon_Waterboys_single.jpg: see image description page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:The_Whole_of_the_Moon_Waterboys_single.jpg for rationale -->

"The Whole of the Moon" was covered by Jennifer Warnes on her 1992 album The Hunter, by Mandy Moore on her 2003 album Coverage, by the band Human Drama on the compilation album New Wave Goes to Hell and by folk singer-songwriter Peter Mulvey on his 1995 release Rapture. It has also appeared on numerous other compilations. The second Pan song, "The Return of Pan", appears on the album Dream Harder. "The Pan Within" is the first Waterboys song to feature Wickham's fiddle playing. It was selected as one of DWXB-FM's Hits of 1986. In Southeast Asia, particularly in the Philippines, when the New Wave era started in 1985, the group's biggest hit single is "The Pan Within", aside from "The Whole of the Moon" and "Don't Bang the Drum".

An alternative version of "Medicine Bow" was released as a single in Germany, with an instrumental version of "Don't Bang the Drum" for the 7-inch. The 12-inch contained another mix of "Medicine Bow" and "Ways of Men". Scott writes that he invented the name, and was unaware of Medicine Bow, Wyoming.

The title track, the last song on the original release, has a slower tempo than most of the other arrangements. Scott notes that he wrote over twenty verses for the song, some of which wound up included on the "alter ego" of "This Is the Sea", "That Was the River", which was released in 1994 on The Secret Life of the Waterboys. Abrahams further described the song as, "...an instruction to throw away the old and embrace the new, catch the train, see the previous existence as something old and gone. It's as though there is a split personality, the war raging inside the head, the mental anguish and the internal argument. This song gets right back into the thrust of "Don't Bang the Drum" and comes full circle, rejecting the soulless existence painted in the LP's opening moments and treating it as a journey, comparable with the traveling of the river into the sea. It's really the sentiment of somebody making a huge adjustment in their life and that really elucidates the theme of the album and points to a crossroads in Mike Scott's creative thinking." The subject of the lyrics is conflicted about their present ("You've got a war in your head / And it's tearing you up inside"), and nostalgic for a past clarity ("And you know you once held the key"). The speaker instead argues that the past is irrelevant ("But that was the river / This is the sea)".

Those additional tracks on the re-release that are not alternative versions of songs originally appearing on the album were recorded in the same recording sessions.

"This Is the Sea" was played in the end credits to the documentary Riding Giants.

The chorus line "That was the river, this is the sea" (credited to Mike Scott) features as the epigraph to the final chapter of Andrew Chadwick's book The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power.

Critical reception

Upon its release, Malcolm Dome of Kerrang! described This Is the Sea as "a veritable shoal of musical ideas, held firm by a ballast of keyboard horizons and string tugs" and continued, "Best in this direction are 'Don't Bang the Drum', 'The Whole of the Moon', 'The Pan Within' and 'This Is the Sea', all of which hum and thrive with life in the fullest sense of the term. This isn't merely aural wallpaper but a strident, confident attempt at eliciting response; the art of texture and dynamics has rarely been better illustrated."

Music Week considered it to go "straight for the epic stuff in an uncommonly well realised manner" and added, "Scott is now a consummate songwriter and while his slightly clipped, almost folky vocal requires some listener tolerance the sheer power of this LP sweeps you away." Andy Strickland of Record Mirror called it "a fine LP" and noted Scott's "continued ability to [produce] excellent rock songs". He felt the album "takes up where A Pagan Place left off", but "disappointingly lacks the triumphant feel and classic consistency of its elder brother", noting that the "stubborn production [is] so similar that it veers dangerously towards being 'just another Waterboys album' rather than a step forward". He also believed it would have been improved with "a more diverse guitar sound, a bit more light and shade which is currently left to the excellent Scott voice". Rolling Stones Parke Puterbaugh wrote, "Mike Scott is more of a poet than a songwriter, yet within his limitations he weaves trances so spellbinding that he has few peers among his musical contemporaries." Billboard described it as "punchy rock with an occasionally John Waite-ish lead vocal" and also praised the "imaginative orchestrations" and "solid songwriting".

In a retrospective review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic noted that This Is the Sea "expand[ed] the epic, multi-layered sound" of A Pagan Place and proved to be "a more ambitious yet more successful record, since it finds Mike Scott at his melodic peak". He added it has "enough strong, accessible moments to make Scott's indulgences forgivable".

Track listing

thumb|Peace, an 1896 etching by [[William Strutt (artist)|William Strutt, based upon Isaiah 11:6–7, was part of the album art for This Is the Sea.]]

All songs written by Mike Scott except where noted.

  1. "Don't Bang the Drum" (Scott, Karl Wallinger) – 6:46
  2. "The Whole of the Moon" – 4:58
  3. "Spirit" – 1:50
  4. "The Pan Within" – 6:13
  5. "Medicine Bow" (Scott, Anthony Thistlethwaite) – 2:45
  6. "Old England" – 5:32
  7. "Be My Enemy" – 4:16
  8. "Trumpets" – 3:37
  9. "This Is the Sea" – 6:29

2004 Expanded Edition bonus tracks

  1. "Beverly Penn" – 5:38
  2. "Sleek White Schooner" – 3:44
  3. "Medicine Bow" (Full Length) (Scott, Thistlethwaite) – 5:44
  4. "Medicine Jack" – 4:11
  5. "High Far Soon" – 2:05
  6. "Even the Trees Are Dancing" – 4:27
  7. "Towers Open Fire" – 4:34
  8. "This Is the Sea" (Live) – 5:53
  9. "Then You Hold Me" – 4:56
  10. "Spirit" (Full Length) – 4:11
  11. "Miracle" – 1:14
  12. "I Am Not Here" – 0:22
  13. "Sweet Thing" (Van Morrison) – 7:11
  14. "The Waves" – 6:38

Personnel

The Waterboys

  • Mike Scott – vocals, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, piano, percussion, synthesiser, drum machine programming, bells and effects
  • Anthony Thistlethwaite – saxophone, double bass, bass guitar, mandolin
  • Karl Wallinger – bass synth, piano, organ, keyboard programming, synthesiser, celeste, percussion and backing vocals

With:

  • Steve Wickham – violin
  • Marek Lipski – violin
  • Roddy Lorimer – trumpet, background vocals
  • Stewart Bartlett – French horn
  • Kevin Wilkinson – bass guitar, drums
  • Martin Swain – bass guitar
  • Chris Whitten – drums, cymbals
  • Pete Thomas – snare drum
  • Martin Ditcham – percussion
  • Max Edie – background vocals
  • Lu Edmonds – bass
  • Matthew Seligman – bass
  • Adrian Johnston – piano (re-release only)

Production credits

  • Mike Scott (tracks 1, 2 & 8)
  • Mike Scott & Mick Glossop (tracks 5, 6, 7 & 9)
  • Mike Scott, John Brand & Mick Glossop (track 4)
  • Mike Scott, Mick Glossop & Karl Wallinger (track 3)

| 23

|-

|-

! scope="row" | European Albums (Eurotipsheet)

| 70

|-

|-

|-

!scope="row"|US Cash Box Top Albums 101 to 200

| 154

|-

!scope="row"|US AOR Albums (Radio & Records)

| 40

|}

Year-end charts

{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"

|+Year-end chart performance for This Is the Sea

! scope="col" | Chart (1986)

! scope="col" | Position

|-

! scope="row" | Dutch Albums (Album Top 100)

| 54

|-

! scope="row" | New Zealand Albums (RMNZ)

| 32

|}

References

  • Lyrics at mikescottwaterboys.com
  • Official forum Chord requests are often fulfilled at "Musician's Corner"