Mike Scott of The Waterboys

what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us today. Our guest this episode is legendary songwriter Mike Scott of

The Water Boys. His career in music began in the seventies, continuing to this day with a discography so prolific we can't possibly discuss it in great detail. What we can say is that we are huge fans of Mike Scott and his music. Here's a snippet of one of his most love songs, followed by the interview in the world forty years but you just saying in your room, I saw the crescent saw. Welcome to the show, Mike. We're really glad to have you. Thanks rank my pleasure. Thank

you for being a guest. The other thing I want to thank you for is uh and words will will fall short, But both myself and my co host have been really big fans of your music for a long time, and it's meant a lot to me at different points in my life. It's sort of been a consistent um inspiration to me in a positive way so many different times.

So thank you so much for that. Okay, So our podcast is called The One You Feed and it's based on the old parable where there is a grandfather who is talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there's a battle going on inside of us, and there's two wolves. One is a good wolf who represents kindness and love and joy, and the other is a bad wolf,

which represents greed or hate, fear, doubt. And the grandson stops and thinks for a second and says well, which one wins and the grandfather says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off the podcast by just asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work. Well, I like parable. I don't think it's an absolute truth, because I don't think that we're split creatures with with a good one and a bad one inside of us. Don't think we're all

paranoid schizophrenics. But I think that parable is important because it's it shows that we have a choice in how we act in every in every encounter, in every instance, and by our choices, we create who we are. And I certainly believe that, and I've noticed that out working

in my life for a long time. So I read The Adventures of water Boy and we sort of end up at the end of that book right around the year two thousand, and I know what the band has been up to since the year two thousand musically and all that. I'm curious a little bit more about where you have been the last thirteen fourteen years, specifically if you've been active Finnhorn and what else you've been up

to personally. Well, actually, I didn't move back to finnt Hoorn finnt Hoorn for your listeners as a spiritual community in the northeast of Scotland. Not not. It doesn't subscribe to any one belief system. There are people there from all different spirits of traditions, but the unifying philosophy would be that spirit or God or or the Great Mystery, whatever your name you want to put on, it is inside each of us and we can access that core part of ourselves and live and make decisions from it.

That's the ethos at fint Hoorn and I was there in the mid nineties and it was a place that a profound influence on me, and in the early two thousand's my wife and I went back to live there. We bought a house and I was there for I think six years through to two thousand and eight, and it was a good experience for me because not only was I living and interacting of the spiritual community, but it was a touring, traveling worldly professional musician at the

same time. So it was a fabulously educational and endlessly interesting experience touring my band from Finnhorn, so I would be going out into the world and doing all these fast activities and moving through cities playing concerts to the thousands of people, and then after I would always go back to finn Hoorn to this rarefied, almost sacred atmosphere, and that was really good for me, really taught me a lot about how to sustain that atmosphere when I

was out in the world. That was a learning that I need needed to go through at the time. Yeah, you mentioned in in the book how when you first went to Finnhorn you weren't Mike Scott, this this famous musician. You were just another person there. And I imagine based on what you're saying, sort of it helps keep that that sort of star on one side versus just another person on the other side. It better imbalance. Well, do you know that was a lesson from my first time

in Fincorn back in the mid nineties. I didn't need to learn that one again. I'd got that one. No, it was more the challenge for me when I went went back to live to Finder. Of course, I didn't move back to Fintorn for these reasons. I just moved back actually because my wife wanted to work again in the community as she had done in the past, and we were a bit fed up being in London at the time, so we thought, all right, why not. So I didn't go for any great benighted spiritual reasons or

for for a particular challenge. But the challenge that I got was this one of moving in and out of the spiritual community atmosphere into the world, back and forth all the time, and learning how to balance those two worlds inside me. And I was just really great learning. Yeah. I think that ties back well of the theme in the podcast, because I think we all go through that

to some extent. We live in a world that is very external focused, and yet for a lot of us are trying to live a deeper and more meaningful life. I am pulled back and forth between those worlds a lot. So I think you know that that is a challenge we all face. Yours is on an extreme level obviously, because those are those worlds are so far apart. Yeah. So, and you met your wife there at Finnhorn right in the mid nineties. Yes, And so where are you living now?

I lived between Dublin and New York. Okay, I've got places in both cities. So one of the things that you you just actually use the word in our last piece was sort of use the words sustain and one of my favorite songs of yours is the song called Sustain from one of your one of your more recent records. And what I really like about it, you know, the main choruses. You know, I've learned how to sustain myself in storms, and and I think as I've gotten older

that's I've certainly gotten better at doing that. Could you share a little bit about how you've learned to sustain yourself? Because what I got from that was really a sense of and I think it's back to the finn Horn theme, right, like, it's inside of us. It's not something external that we need in order to bring us through things. Blues are followed like showers a ring. But I don't feel like crying death is abroad this day. But I don't feel like I learned how to sustain myself, how to sustain

myself in storms. Yeah, somewhere along the line, I found that the replenishing power was inside me. Um. But I also needed to have a kind of stillness inside me to be able to do that, to access that power. If I'm confused and I'm I'm running around the handless chicken, and I'm stressed and worried about things, I can't access those healing, holistic parts inside of me that give me the wherewithal to recalibrate myself regardless of what's happening. I

need to need to have stillness. So it's not just finding a sustaining partent side mean, it's also being still. That's a crucial thing. And have you so you've been out of fin Horn for a while and yet you still sort of go back and forth between the the hectic music world and then back to a to a personal life. Have you found you been able to maintain some degree of stillness when you go back to a

world that's not as removed as finn Horn. Oh yeah, I'm pretty i haven't been a find Hoorn for quite a while, and I'm pretty chilled out wherever I am. Take a lot to stress me out, do you. I'm unpressurable. I'm glad to see. Oh that's that's a good place to be. Yeah. How much that do you think is attributable to um the spiritual practices you've learned, and how much of that do you think is attributable to sort of the maturation process that we all go through as

we get older. It's a bit of both. At probably equal amounts. I learned to meditate in the early nineties. I still meditate, not every day now, but it's that's given me tools, really perception tools that that enable me to take a step back from whatever might be happening in a day, or in a week, or in an event. And that's that distance is very useful. Yeah, I think that's a you know, that's a theme that seems to

come up a lot on this show. Is that is that ability to sort of step away and and learn to observe your mind, just to step back from it and be able to step out of the the swirl of emotions and thoughts and recognize that that's not reality. It's a it's a it's a construct that we've put there. So one of the big things that seems to have happened, I don't think it was necessarily big to you, but I think that's why I'm asking, is uh. Ellie Goulden recorded a version of how How Long Will I Love You?

That seemed to do pretty well in the charts. At any reaction to that, Oh, it's true. She was in the top ten for ten weeks at Pleased to See It's lovely that a hit record how long I love you, as long as stars are above you, longer hellong need you, as long as the season's need to hello. It's a beautiful song, and I've heard her version, but no one will ever do it do it the right way except you. In my books, Thanks very much, have been quite a

number of good cover versions of that song. Actually, yeah, Ellie's is. Ellie's is the one that's been successful and good for her, but they've did some of the good ones as well. In the book, there's there's something you talk about and I'd like to I'd like to see if you could kind of walk us through it a little bit, because I think it's very relevant to what

we're talking about. And you you start a chapter by describing an Indian hoops dancer and and a ritual that he goes through and kind of what that translated to you in your life. Could you maybe walk us through that? Well. It was in the early nineties. I was just moved to New York. I spent two years in New York, and I went to see the American Indian Dance Theater I think maybe it's called the Native American Dance Theaters in an old theater on seventh Avenue, and the grand

finale was this guy, the hoop Dancer. And I don't know if you you or your listeners have seen photographs or film with hoop pants. What it is is it's a young Native American who has comes out with three wooden hoops and he starts answering with them, and as he dances, he's managing to pass them around and over

his body in ways that defy the eye. And then he produces more hoops and more and more, until he's dancing with maybe two dozen hoops and balancing them all beautifully in various shapes, and how he manages to get his body through them as he's dancing. I don't know. It's a kind of Houdini esque miracle for the eye, and I took it. I think perhaps it was in the program that the theater production program that what the hoop dancers doing, what his dance symbolizes, is that he's

balanced all the different aspects of his life. The hoops each represent different areas of different interests, of different concerns in his own life, and by balancing when he's demonstrating his mastery of himself. And of course he's certainly demonstrating his physical master of himself, so it's a that it has a correlation to his spiritual or or personal mastery

of himself. So I was very impressed by that, and for a long time after that, I really wanted to be the hoop, answered myself, not that I would go around on the stage with the hoops, but that I would master all the different aspects of my own life, and that that gave me a good template too to view how I was doing. If you like, it's a challenging subject. I think for a lot of us to to balance things, and I tend to be relatively obsessive.

So I get into something and I am all the way into that and the things that the other things around it in my life sometimes can suffer. And as I've gotten older, it's certainly been a matter of how do you strike that balance and how do you integrate the different parts of yourself, because I think at that point where they all come together is really the thing that defines us as individuals, and our unique contribution is

that sort of meshing of all those things. You're in Nashville now, and I think you said doing pre production on the New Water Boys record. Anything you can share with us about that, well, I can tell you it's snowing outside my window that I don't get snowed in because I'm going back to New York tomorrow and i'd

like to make it. I've been rehearsing with a couple of the players who will be on the record, a great giber poicle Paul Brown from Memphis, and a guitar playnicle Jay Barkley, who who was in the Last Waterboys touring band in North America a few months ago. So we've been working on parts and developing the songs and on the back here in three weeks time to make the record, taking it there in Nashville. Can you tell us who's producing it? I'm producing it yea. And will

will the fellow who fiddles be involved? Oh? He certainly will he will? Yeah? And do you have a Do you have a time frame for release? We're not sure. If we can get it out in September, then then we'll do that. But but I know that recording in March and probably mixing maybe late April, and all the cover and promotion to process and set up. I think we might be pustion it for September. Realisticly, might it might be January. We're certainly eager to hear it. Will

there be a Will there be a US tour? Will of course wonderful? Yeah, we uh we. I've seen you multiple times here and I think I mentioned to you in our email correspondence. My my co host and I met you years and years ago. I had to be

probably and and just had a brief conversation. And one of the things that's really cool about having you on this show is my cost and I've been really best friends for twenty five years, and our when our friendship really started, I think your music was one of the things that we have consistently shared over all these years. So it's special to have you with this particular podcast also given that that you of your music has been pretty central to a lot of things with us. UM,

it's lovely. No thanks for telling me. Oh, so you UM. A piece of music you released over the last year you had you had the Yates record, but you also released a one off sort of single or or satire called around Arthur's Day in Ireland. Could you tell us

about that? Well, Arthur's Day. Arthur's Day is an advertising event dreamed up by the clever of people behind Guinness Beer and what they do is the exactly six months after St Patrick's Day, as if as if as a counterweight, they announced Arthur's Day, when Guinness will be half price at certain hours of the day and everybody will toast Arthur Guinness who invented Guinness at seventeen hours and fifty nine minutes. Of course, Guinness was established in the year

seventeen fifty is very very clever. But the reality of on the streets as it becomes a binge drinking excuse for Ireland and the streets are filled with vomit and this drunken people and it's really an awful, awful event. And the advertising is Ireland's a very small country. It's probably hard for anyone in American to understand just how small and colloquial Ireland is. And when you have a heavy marketing exercise like Gennesses for Arthur's Day, it becomes

absolutely inescapable. It's like the Super Bowl multiplied by ten and an Ireland is a country with a big drink problem. I think if Ireland were personified, it might be an alcoholic and in a country has such a problem, everyone in Ireland either has someone in their family or as someone close to them who's an alcoholic or has suffered the effects of alcoholism, and in such a country to have this drink, this binge event presented as if it's

a national holiday. It's kind of offensive. And a lot of people, after four or five years of Artist Day being ran down our throats by these marketing then a lot of people got fed up or piste as you say in America. In Britain and articles, pissed means drunk, so we don't use that, we say piste off. So

a lot of us were piste off. And I thought, I'm gonna write a song about this, because I'm going to use the weapon that I have, which is my words, and I'm going to write a satirical song that tells what actually happens during the Arthur's day and polkes and punctures the lie that this event is all right. So that's what I did, and it got quite a lot

of us to day and police to say. It was mentioned in the New York Times and and the Herald Tribune and various newspapers around the world, and along with a song similar song written by the great Irish Bard and singer Christy Moore and the two of us with

our our anti artist Day songs. I think we created a climate of bad publicity for arturs Day and our hope and a lot of people that Guinness or their owners, their masters will have realized that office days actually counterproductive because it brings a be gives them a bad name. So I'm hoping that that's the last of our Thursday, but if if they announced it again this year, I'll be there with my son. We'll show the world where drinkers on ar Thursday, not gentlemen or thinkers on Arthursday.

We'll puke in our hands and PITSI where we stand with phil any Wards, will bingeing Min's talk shite all night in Ireland and our horns on ar Thursday. It's very well done. It's it's a it's a great satire than you have You not drank or or done anything for a long time? Is that kind of your your story? Well? Do you know I made friends with Mr Guinness when I was in my late twenties, and then I became his slave, and then I decided we would never talk again.

That was I stopped drinking. I didn't go to a air or anything like that. I just got fed out with it and decided that was at once in my life back But no, I haven't had a drink since then. Has that been Has that been a challenge for you at all? I mean you're exposed to it all the time. Nope, I'm lucky. No challenge. Yeah, I've I've been there too. I think mine might have been. Um Mr Old Crow and I had a conversation and decided to decided to

stop talking. But similar similar ending, what are you listening to these days? What? What sort of music travels with Mike Scott these days? Well, I listened to a lot of new music and a lot of old music. I'm forever listening to music from what I think is the golden age of the music from about seventy one. There's no end of magic from that period. It for me, And in the last few years I've been listened to

a lot of great soul music from that period. James Brown's liestone, Motown Stacks Northern so what we in Britain called northern soul music. But I listened a lot of new bands as well. I like Flee, Fox's Shovels and Rope real cool band. That there are dual like the white stripes, but the bit a little bit more down home. I'd like Joanna knew some a lot. And you know, I'm always discovering stuff. I have an I thought full of music to listen to. Yeah, there's it's It's amazing.

The breadth of music that's available to us these days is really busy, isn't it. Everybody's listening to different stuff as well. In the sixties, everybody's listened to the same things. There was this unified audience. But now we're all in our headphones listen to our own a little world. Do you think that's overall a positive thing? I just think it is what it is. I can see things that have been lost, but I see things that have been gained as well. So it just as the word is.

It's just at times yep, and and fighting against the marching forward of technology as a feudal endeavor for sure. Yeah. So within your music, there's a lot of there's a lot of references to spirituality. You've gone to you know, we've talked a little bit about the finn Horn time and all that. What does the word spiritual mean? Do you have somebody ask you to say what that word means. Wow.

Words are faulty because they, like a snowball going down the hill, they gather ideas to them, and different people have different ideas about the same words. Love, God, Spirit. All these words have so many different meanings, different interpretations that I'm loath to add to that by giving yet another. So what I would say is that I think everybody

has a spiritual side. Everybody is a spiritual being, and we come down into this world, into the world of form, and it's very easy to lose touch with our spiritual selves because we get in trance, or some would say ensnared by the lure of form, by appearances. Then it gets tired. Spirit don't man surrenders Spirit won't man crawls spirits. Spirit lives with men days man seems spirit. Then there is man is tilert, stirred free, what stirred is man?

We all still have this other thing inside that can inform and inspire us in a way that is beyond words. And for me, the best thing in my last twenty years has been finding that inside me and and learning how to stay in contact with that. And so that's that for me, that spirituality, And how do you what is your method for sort of I know this is a question that is there's no good answer for, but what are some of the things you do that keep you in touch with that and and remind you to

go back to that? Well. I I continually observed myself and question why I do things. If I find myself in a situation and I act a particularly way, I'll look at that. I don't just blame it on outside circumstances.

I know that I'm the author of every action that I take, and and really, if I extend that line of thinking, I'm really the author of every circumstance in my life because the things that happened to me are the results of choices that I've made and of trains of events that I've set in motion by the things that I've thought and decided and done. So I'm the author of my own fortune, whether it be good fortune

or misfortune. So when things when ship happens to me, I don't blame it on the outside world and feel like a victim. I think, Okay, how did I put myself in the situation where this happened? And that that gives me information and also is an incredibly empowering way of looking at my life because it means that I'm responsible for what happens, and I can change what happens by the way that I respond to things. So I keep that as a practice every day, so I wouldn't

even call it spiritual practice, just all life practice. And that keeps me straight, and it keeps me aware and awake. And I also remember always that that I'm a spiritual being of a human experience. And I also believe that we're all God, that we're all we're all really one, one being, one experience in our sense of ourselves as a separate selves is a helpful illusion because without it, we wouldn't be able to function in the physical world.

But it's only an illusion. Really, there's only one of us here having a kaleidoscopic experience through billions of sell of And I remember that. And I've had moments of my life when I actually perceive life like that through that lens, and I remember those moments and and always keep that as a kernel in my consciousness that I

I remember is true. Yeah, I think it's. I think an interesting thing along those lines is we we talked with We had someone else on the podcast who was talking about there's a transcendental world that he has visited where that sense of oneness is really there, and then there's a day to day life we find ourselves in, and that those worlds are not necessarily connected, but the remembering of one whilere and the other is really helpful. Yeah,

they're both present. Both those worlds are present at all times, and it's only by our perception that we moved in and out of them. But they're both here, and in fact, the transcendental world is the real world. I always found when I be the Fintorn, he would say, when I'd come back to the city or whatever, to the normal life as you might call it, people say, oh, you're back in the real world, and I would say, excuse me, I've just been to the real world. YEP, so is there.

I know you've you've got a lot of you're a reader of a lot of different things. Are there any spiritual works or things along those lines. I'm not a big fan of that term, but I don't have a better one. Um that that you have been reading these days, or that that sort of influence you're thinking. I've been reading ram Das's recent book Be Love Now, and if your listeners know who ram Das is, that he's spirituality too.

He has been actors since the early seventies. He went to India during that year when lots of people are going out seeking gurus, and he met a guru there who would have profound influence on and he spent the rest of his life disseminating the teachings that he received from Skuru. Be Love Now is a beautiful book. And do you find that's another way that you, for lack of a better word, feed your good wolf is going to books and literature and continuing to sort of refresh

those ideas. Would you know, Eric, I have periods when I don't read any spiritual books at all, and sometimes I'm fool and I just need to stop breathing stuff in. For a few years, when I went back and lived in Fintorn in the early two thousand's, I had three or four years of intense spiritual reading and education. And then for about the next six or seven years, I don't think I read a single spiritual book. I just needed to breathe out for a while. I needed to

to live what I've learned. And then in the last year or so, I've started to slowly pick up books again. I'm ready for some new inputs. Yeah, it's it. That is a very profound way of talking about that idea that it's really easy to consume a lot of stuff, but the enough it is really where the challenge comes. Yeah, that's right. I guess I would just wrap up by asking is there anything that you would want to say sort of on our theme that you would you'd want

to leave us with. Well, I don't get too to fix them. The positive side, I think it's good too to acknowledge all the parts of yourself. And sometimes it can be really useful to be angry about something. Sometimes being angry is what needs to happen in the person. I don't mean that you then act abusively towards people or take out your anger and people. But sometimes anger an appropriate emotion, and sometimes it's all right to be down.

Sometimes you have to go through little spells of being down or depressed, and I think it's good to I find when when I'm hurt during or I'm upset or I'm sad, I allow myself to go through that because if I don't, if I push it under, then it's only going to come back up and distort my experiences in some way. So I go through all these things that it's important to go through. Whoever is is in front of me, whatever I need to go through, I'll

go through it. Whether it's positive or or so called negative. It's just all life or or John Das would say, it's old grist for the mill. Yep, I love that. I love that phrase, Chris for the mill. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us. I'm excited to hear the New water Boys record and excited to see you when you when you tour back through the US. Thanks, thanks for it, ye take care bye,

all right bye. You can find out more about Mike Scott and the One You Feed podcast at one you Feed dot net slash Mike Scott. Hey, just when you thought the podcast was over, I'm back to ask you, whether a faithful subscriber or a lucky newcomer, to please go on iTunes and give us a high rating and any comments or suggestions who might have. In return, we promised to never interview anyone with the last name Kardashian.