Sharpen your sense of wonder/Listen to what I've found," sings Mike Scott, the creative force of the Waterboys, on Room to Roam, the successful follow-up to Fisherman's Blues, the band's best record and the one on which Scott, a Scotsman hugely influenced by Bob Dylan, first displayed his seemingly sudden enthrallment with Irish traditional music. What he's found, and can't wait to tell us about on Room to Roam, is peace of mind, a home on the Emerald Isle (in Spiddal, where this album and much of its predecessor were recorded), a coproducer who twice worked with Dylan (Barry Beckett) and true love, in all its excitable-boy joy, for both a woman and a country. As a result, Room to Roam carouses delightedly and delightfully with its pixilated Irishness, while the singer-songwriter, wide-eyed in wonderment but rarely forgetting he's an artist, spins out an eternal story as if it had never before been told.

That's exactly the right approach for a happy tale like this, because unless you can hear Scott occasionally stumbling over his naiveté while sounding like the wisest – and sometimes the unwisest – fool in love, you're not going to believe in the virtue of his passion. And that would be a pity, because Scott's passion – like his sure and touching singing – is always pure and playful, never smug or exclusionary like that of many true believers.

Room to Roam is probably more interesting and inventive in its music than in its lyrics, though no less heartfelt. There's some rock & roll, an impressive mixture of rock music and Celtic ruralism ("Song From the End of the World"), Beatles and Donovan echoes and, of course, lots of grand guitar, fiddle, mandolin, whistle, flute and accordion playing, with fiddler Steve Wickham and mandolinist-saxophonist Anto Thistlewaite deftly leading the way through the fray and filigree of several Irish dance tunes. "Spring Comes to Spiddal" fuses folk traditionalism and instrumentation with a trumpet and trombone from New Orleans Dixieland jazz, while "Natural Bridge Blues" sounds like a cross between an Irish jig and an American square dance. On "Something That Is Gone," producers Scott and Beckett electronically bend Thistlewaite's sax solo in the middle, transporting it to a wonderful new place. Only on "A Life of Sundays" and "Islandman" (two fine songs marred by pretentious voice-overs) does Scott trip over invention into excess. He's certainly not excessive in length: Only four of the seventeen listed tunes (there are a few unlisted ones) run over three minutes.

Overall, however, the Spiddal skyline shines brightly on Scott's adopted home and inspiration, a place with more than a little magic in it. (RS 592)

PAUL NELSON