Music
You Need to Hear this Song #5
Heavy Rotation #5- The Whole of the Moon, The Waterboys (This is the Sea, 1985)
Heavy Rotation was a music industry term for songs that one way or another got a lot of airplay. It referred to the large amount of rotation that a particular record got on turntables at radio stations. Since, until the 1980s, this was the only way to get new music into the ears and brains of listeners, heavy rotation meant increased sales. Increased sales were good for the record company and artist alike.
These days, some of us still put records on at home and give them a spin. Most of us don’t. However, the term still applies, though in a different way. Streaming services like Spotify sell subscriptions to listeners and then pay artists based on listens. At least, that’s the way we think it works.
For me, heavy rotation means a song that is in my head for some reason. Maybe for a moment, maybe for a day, maybe for longer. It’s a song that you come back to from time to time and still feels just as good. This series of articles is dedicated to these songs.
In this series, I am going to highlight a particular song by a particular band or singer. We should know a bit about the band, to know a bit about where the song fits into its history and where the song fits into what was happening in music at that time. Then there’s the song itself. Who’s playing on it, what are the lyrics getting at and why is it so good? How does it still occupy sonic space in our lives?
I’ll (try to) keep it short. It shouldn’t take you any longer to read than the song itself. To that end, I’ll put a Youtube clip of the original recording at the top of the article so you can listen as you read. Or not. And because a song is often much different live than in the recording studio, I’ll stick a live clip on at the end.
What song is in your head right now? Here’s one that won’t leave mine today:
#5 — The Whole of the Moon, The Waterboys (This is the Sea, 1985)
In the mid to late 1980s, in suburban North America, we had a few places to get access to new music: radio stations, video channels and record store visits. If you read Rolling Stone or later, Spin or NME, you might have heard of some music outside of the mainstream. Still, it did seem like there were endless options, even when in hindsight a lot of it was the same.
Word of mouth was another way to latch on to something out of the ordinary. The Waterboys came to me this way when my sister came home with a tape. How she found out about them, I don’t know as they were non-existent on the aforementioned radio stations or MTV.
But by the time I got round to them around 1990, they were already 5 albums in, beginning in 1983 with a self titled album and then A Pagan Place (1984), This is the Sea (1985), Fisherman’s Blues (1988) and Room to Roam (1990). I say they, but the Waterboys are really the work of Mike Scott from Edinburgh, the session musicians being relatively interchangeable between albums. The Wikipedia entry shows 7 current members and at least 75 former ones.
It was Fisherman’s Blues that got me into them, but it was This is the Sea that got me hooked. It was different from anything that was being played in my world at that time. Celtic folk music, but in a rock and roll way. Intelligent lyrics of love and longing. The Hothouse Flowers would give them a run for their money for a while, with the same formula, but faded just as quickly. The Waterboys endured.
The song itself is straightforward and wastes no time getting underway, in a straight ahead mix of drums, bass, a guitar, with the piano and violin driving the melody. See Karl Wallinger, later of World Party, on the keys.
Scott’s raspy and exuberant vocal comes in at 00:21 and we get a glimpse into what is to come, “I pictured a rainbow / you held it in your hands”. It’s a song we can imagine written about the woman he is with at the time and it’s a back and forth between the way she is out in the world, grabbing it by the tail and already having life figured out, while he is way behind, playing catch up at best. He cannot believe his own ignorance of the world in the face of her arms, mind and heart open approach to it.
“I saw the crescent / You saw the whole of the moon”. He knows what’s out there and he wonders about it. But not here, she just does. She is living her life fully, deeply and he is struggling to keep up with her.
“I was grounded / While you filled the skies / I was dumbfounded by truth / you cut through lies” He is wondering out loud about how he’s wasted his time, and how he can know so little. Through having fooled around he lacks motivation, he lacks spirit and he lacks imagination about what life can be. She has those things.
A beautiful Beatle-esque trumpet comes in at 1:58 and at 2:15 a female background voice gives colour to the 3rd verse of the song.
“I spoke about wings / you just flew / I wondered, I guessed and I tried / You just knew”. He aspires to approach life like this too, but just hasn’t…yet. Will he ever?
By 3:45 the song has hit the rising action and piano, violin, backing vocals, trumpets, saxophone combine for a joyful noise and Scott asks one more time, “How on earth did you see the whole of the moon?”
Who among us hasn’t felt like this at one point or another in life?
Watch the live video below to get a taste of what frontman showmanship really looks like.
And if that’s not enough, watch the Killers give it a go. The joy on the face of Brandon Flowers tells you everything you need to know about this song. Goosebumps at 2:20, no?
