Dream Harder
| Dream Harder | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by The Waterboys | ||||
| Released | 25 May 1993 | |||
| Recorded | New York, New York | |||
| Genre | Rock | |||
| Length | 43:33 | |||
| Label | Geffen, Puck | |||
| Producer | Mike Scott, Bill Price | |||
| The Waterboys chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
| Rolling Stone | |
Dream Harder is an album released in 1993 credited to The Waterboys, but recorded by Mike Scott with session musicians. It was the last Waterboys album before Scott spent seven years pursuing a formal solo career, with Bring 'Em All In (1995) and Still Burning (1997). The album reached position 171 on the Billboard Top 200 charts, surpassing the previous Waterboys album Room to Roam, in spite of a less-than-enthusiastic response from critics to the album's sound.
The album art was provided by the photography of Michael Halsband and John Hardin and the painting of Pal Shazar, under the direction of Frank Olinsky and Tom Zutaut.
Dream Harder was a return to a rock, or even hard rock, sound after the traditional Celtic-influenced preceding two albums. It did, however, continue The Waterboys' tradition of arranging a William Butler Yeats poem, in this case "Love And Death". "The Return of Pan" is The Waterboys' second ode to the Greek deity, and the album contains a number of references to the romantic Neopaganism of Dion Fortune and the mystical Christianity of C. S. Lewis, as well as a tribute to guitarist Jimi Hendrix.
"The New Life", one of many Scott songs which are both optimistic and touch upon spirituality, contains a phrase "Are you under the mercy?", which Scott explains as "a phrase I nicked from a Christian fan who wrote me a letter and signed off with "under the mercy", which I took to mean (and this is what I intended in the song) "under the mercy of spirit/the sacred/the presence of love" - though Christians would say under the mercy of Christ".
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