The Power of Sincerity

            …it looks like this.

I saw The Waterboys touring their most recent album An Appointment with Mr. Yeats. The show was just as amazing as everyone is saying it was [here] [here] [here].

Truth be told, I always thought Mike Scott, the band’s lead man, was a little silly - he whispers, he rolls his r’s, he plays his Irish accent more than his guitar. It’s easy to call it overkill.

But this show brought me around. Scott has world class control over his voice - in a Shakespearean actor sort of way, not an Adele sort of way. Making music to the poetry of Yeats is the perfect outlet for Scott’s talent. His passion, even nerdiness for the poetry is too sincere to be appreciated today – I think we’re all a little afraid to step outside our own irony. Scott forced me out. I knew it was gone for sure when he stepped onto the stage in his three-faced mask (a reference to Yeats’ theory of the mask).

I’m hoping that the horrendous mask will become some sort of icon in musical history. It deserves it. See it below.

The equally literate warm-up act was amazing too. Freddie Stevenson is a Scottish cross between Mike Scott and Bob Dylan. Here he is singing about J.K. Rowling.