Some preliminaries: First, as you may know from other posts, I’m particularly emotionally susceptible to certain songs (hymns), sights, gestures, words, scenes from films, even though I’m pretty stolid in other affairs of everyday life. Neurology and psychology have a lot to do with this, I’d bet, but it’s how I am in deep ways. Second, I have known about ‘The Whole of the Moon’ and much of the Waterboys’ catalogue from when things were first released, at least up until the turn of the century when I stopped listening to radio in favour of listening to semi-random shuffle of digital files.
More recently — perhaps five to seven years — I was listening to my usual shuffle (crudely: star-weighted and recency-balanced) when ‘The Whole of the Moon’ came on, and it struck a hammer blow to my heart. I had heard it before, but not listened so carefully, and the song bowled me over. Since then I’ve put a higher priority to listening to Waterboys tracks, and Margaret and I listened to the recent Life, Death, and Dennis Hopper album a lot in preparation to catching their tour when they rolled through Oxford. As I’ve had a chance to pay closer attention to my favourites from their work, I thought I’d write one of my ‘what makes it good’/‘Great Moments in Popular Music’ posts about ‘The Whole of the Moon’.
At the heart of the song, Mike Scott proposes a simple but quite powerful metaphorical comparison between two people — one who sees the obvious, the manifest (‘the crescent’ [moon], easily visible and beautiful, but partial), and another who sees more comprehensively (‘the whole of the moon’). The comparison is so straightforward but insightful that in lesser hands it could have been an impressive dénouement to a workmanlike song of romantic aspiration.
But instead, Scott embeds the couplet as a refrain among verses that repeat the gesture with different metaphorical settings. That’s risky, especially with so striking a pivotal instance recurring throughout the lyric; again, most writers would end up with an array of more or less colourful paired comparisons that contrast with, and ultimately drag down, the refrain. But Scott selects sequential contrasts that with inventive imagination reinforce the overall premise. Just in the first verse, the ‘more obvious’ partner pictured a rainbow, had flashes (presumably of insight), wandered (aimlessly) out in the world — whereas the more profound partner holds a rainbow in their hand, knows the plan, and stayed in their room (in a state of sufficiency). Subsequent verses follow a similar pattern, each summed up with the ‘moon’ couplet (the first time I heard the song, the contrast between seeing ‘the rain-dirty valley’ and seeing ‘Brigadoon’ was what caught my attentive interest).
Between the verses Scott develops a refrain characterising the secondary protagonist as having transgressed boundaries ‘too high, too far, too soon’ in apparently causal conjunction with their having seen ‘the whole of the moon’, the only time he ascribes costs to the partner’s wisdom. Thus the refrain casts an additional light on seeing the whole: Scott voices the admiring perspective of one who hasn’t reached the heights of the other, but who has not been as high, as far, as soon. The profound partner has paid for their perspective a cost that the more cautious Scott hasn’t, and possibly wouldn’t pay.
In the final verse, Scott sets aside the paired contrasts and unleashes a flood of evocative images he associates with the partner’s vision: ‘Unicorns and cannonballs, palaces and piers / Trumpets, towers and tenements / Wide oceans full of tears / Flags, rags ferryboats / Scimitars and scarves…’. By opening the sequence with ‘unicorns’ (the national animal of Scotland, cheers!) he signals that his subject’s wisdom reaches beyond mere expertise or calculation but extends into the realm of fantasy, an effect that the alliteration and internal rhyme in subsequent lines tends to accentuate; factual knowledge doesn’t come in such richly ornamental parcels. (Listeners from outwith Scotland should remember that ‘tenements’ refers not to American slum dwellings but to the distinctive Scottish arrangement of flats in multi-storey buildings, here contrasting somewhat with ‘towers’ and more distantly to ‘palaces’, but not specifically invoking deprivation.) The verse concludes with a summation that affirms the fantastic range and value of the subject’s imagination: ‘Every precious dream and vision underneath the stars…’. And in the last iteration of the refrain, the wise one no longer has ‘a torch in your pocket and the wind at your heels’ as in previous refrains, but has ‘the wind in your sails / You came like a comet / Blazing your trail’, again underscoring the fabulous advent of the visionary partner.
Apart from the stunning lyrics, the musical performance too intensifies the song’s impact. It provides evidence for my abiding conviction that rock songs that can incorporate a horn section should incorporate a horn section; here the horns add a hooky fanfare flourish that sticks in one’s memory, along with the remarkable effect (I think I remember having read that Scott ascribed it to the late Karl Wallinger, but, rechecking, I see that Scott uses ‘we’) of the explosion in the background at the word ‘cannonballs’, as though the song itself was exploding into the world.
The whole of ‘The Whole of the Moon’ unfolds brilliant musicians outdoing themselves in supporting an artfully crafted lyric. It occurred to me to write this after listening to it this morning (Margaret and I scrambled to play some excellent tunes to purify our heads of eagworms after somebody played ‘Season in the Sun’ on Radio Four this morning); I could listen to it again now, and through the day. As someone who sees the crescent, but knows there must be a whole moon there beyond my grasp, the song speaks to me of the joy of celebrating imaginative expression beyond anything I can evoke — and I’m. very thankful for that.