"We Will not be Lovers" (The Waterboys)

It was very difficult to choose the song for my first post. Even so, I knew which album it had to come from: Fisherman’s Blues by The Waterboys. What a classic! Released in 1988 — I was 15. What I loved about this album was that it had elements of traditional Irish music — mandolin, fiddle, accordion, and lively, aching lyrics — but it also had a contemporary edge. I imagine this kind of combination already existed in Irish music, but it was the first time I had ever encountered it. I was mesmerized.

Fisherman’s Blues came into my life because I was working on a cable access show called South Side Video. Remember MTV back in the days when they played music videos? In between songs, the VJ would talk about the band, or whatever came into her head. That was me. Except, instead of MTV, this was cable access, and most all the VJs and crew were suburban high school students. The show was broadcast live on Saturday afternoons. We got all kinds of promo CDs from the record companies, and when this one came in, I grabbed it because I read in the press packet that it was recorded in Spiddal, on the west coast of Ireland.

Back then, when I got a new CD, I always read along with the lyrics, maybe the first hundred times I listened to it (give or take). Since this one didn’t have any lyrics in the CD booklet, I just stared at the cover art: 10 ragged-looking guys in front of a ivy-covered stone building. I imagined that the air was always heavy with the smell of saltwater and that the village of Spiddal might be situated along a rocky coastline, where the sea seemed to meet the sky. When I finally went to Spiddal several years later, that’s pretty much what I found.

In selecting a specific song from the album, I’d say that “The Stolen Child” was the most emotive for me, as it’s based on the poem by Yeats, and the song just feels sweeping and epic. But that song doesn’t really represent the tone of the album as I always think of it, which is, at its core, a bit more lively.

So instead, I give you “We Will Not Be Lovers.” I love this song. I can’t help but move when I hear it. And the lyrics are sublime — longing and passionate and brutal and heartbreaking. All the things that, when I think about it, Ireland itself came to be for me.

Enjoy.