One of the first songs I wrote for this record is called The Fisherman. A rather thinly-veiled tune about lost love, The Fisherman tells of a man who flees a town and a girl because he knows that although his simple life on the sea appeals to her, it won’t forever, and that someday she will yearn for the security of the life she once had on land:
The Fisherman
There is not much time
On our sinking boat
I have lost the lines
To the cold
Your sleeping face so warm
Had to leave this town
So the moor was bare
When you ran down
You could never see
You would never see
You would always want to know
Could it have happened differently
With your eyes glued to the coast
While we’re drifting out to sea
Baby I’ve done all the sums
Though I’m just a fisherman
There is nothing in my sea
That could keep you from your land
To the dark we’ll go
Where the monsters go
In that empty cold
Where we won’t be seen
I have left behind
All that is still whole
Oh the course I’ve gone
You won’t know
Anyway, a good friend of mine pointed out to me this week that there was a poem called The Fisherman by WB Yeats. I had never heard of it so she sent a version to me. I’m trying to figure out the similarity between Yeats’ fisherman and mine, cause I swear there is one. Maybe it is because they are both essentially lies. Yeats’ fisherman is a self-concious romanticisation. A false character. He is an idealisation of the rural worker – the “simple but wise” countryman – and the creation of a poet who is disillusioned with the mundanity and artlessness of urban life. It is a characterisation based more on wistfulness on part of the author than on truth, and in the end Yeats owns up to this, telling us that his fisherman is “a man who does not exist, a man who is but a dream”. Similarly, my fisherman is a fiction. Really this song is about a man who lives a chaotic life and who runs from a relationship because he knows he will be the ruin of it. The innocence of the fisherman is a facade; an idealisation. What will ruin them is not the sea, it is his “sinking boat”. 
The Fisherman by William Butler Yeats
Although I can see him still.
The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies,
It’s long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I’d looked in the face
What I had hoped ‘twould be
To write for my own race
And the reality;
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer,
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.
Maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the down-turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream;
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, ‘Before I am old
I shall have written him one
poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.
