“Fisherman's Blues” by The Waterboys

"Fisherman's Blues" was the lead single and title track of the Waterboys' fourth album in 1988, and it began life in the air. Flying home from New York to London at the end of the band's North American tour in November 1985, with his relationship with manager Gary Kurfirst going sour, Mike Scott wedged himself into seat 31F and wrote down how he felt on the back of his boarding pass. Some of the words also owe a debt to W. H. Auden's poem "The Night Mail".

Scott wrote it with fiddler Steve Wickham and produced it himself, and the sound is pure open-air joy: Wickham's fiddle and Anthony Thistlethwaite's mandolin reeling around Scott's guitar and voice while Trevor Hutchinson and Peter McKinney keep it rolling. It went to number 3 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart and got a second run as a single in 1991, promoting The Best of The Waterboys 81–90.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.