"This Is the Sea"

This song has "rites of passage" written all over it. I'm still trying to work out just how many different ways you could apply this song to life in general: coming of age, leaving home, getting married, getting divorced, giving it all up and running away to Thailand, having children, retirement, getting out of jail... the list goes on. The Waterboys were very, very good at this kind of sense of yearning and ambition. Every song I hear seems to be packed full of cheap 'n easy metaphors for both students and lateral-thinking middle-aged ponderers. Yet for all that, this is a song of empathy, a song of understanding. It rattles along at a stately pace, driven by what seems like an orchestra of acoustic guitars, woodwinds and Mike Scott's folk-gypsy voice cruises through the middle of it all, burning with conviction and the urgent need to persuade us all that everything's all right: "Now if you’re feelin’ weary/If you’ve been alone too long/Maybe you’ve been suffering from/A few too many/Plans that have gone wrong/And you’re trying to remember/How fine your life used to be/Running around banging your drum/Like it’s 1973/Well that was the river/This is the sea!"