by Dave Franklin

Created on: February 04, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

Mike Scott has followed a path that has moved between building the most epic of musical creations at one extreme and the simplest soundscapes at the other. All the time in this wide range of styles he has maintained a spiritual quality and intelligence within his work that is not often seen in modern music. The Early eighties saw Mike Scott and band member John Caldwell moving their Edinburgh based Another Pretty Face, to London. Upon its demise Mike stayed in London to work on some demo tracks of his own. These tracks were to surface as the basis of the first album in Scotts new band, The Waterboys. Early albums contained some epic stadium type songs that although played on a big scale contained musical subtleties and clever penmanship that set them apart from their contemporaries. The pinnacle of their achievements in purely commercial terms was a tour with U2 and Simple Minds and shifting large volumes of their third album "This is the Sea" which contained their best known hit "Whole of the Moon" But by now Mike Scott was not thinking in commercial terms, in fact quite the opposite. From here on Scotts writing became more introspective and smaller, the days of the "Big Music" as he called it had passed and the music became more personal.

By the early nineties Scott had abandoned attempts to work in a band format having become dissatisfied with the ever-shifting line ups and had become a live in guest at the Findhorn spiritual community centre in Scotland. It was at this location that "Bring 'Em All in" was written and conceived and was recorded in a tiny basement studio at a nearby community theatre, just the artist and an engineer, and the peace and calm of this quieter life clearly shines through in his work. The quest for the "Big Music" of his younger days had by now been replaced by the quest for some sort of inner peace.

The soft acoustic strumming gently leads us into Scott's very personal world, a song of universal love sung with total conviction and no hint of pretension. Scotts art as a writer is to tackle subjects that lesser artists would be too heavy handed in their writing, too clich, too obvious, too cheesy. In a time that is undergoing a revival of male singer songwriters such as David Gray, Damien Rice and most recently James Blunt, this album from a decade previously makes the connecting between the newcomers and the likes of James Taylor and the like. In is hard for one man in a studio playing mainly guitar to accompany his words to produce

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