Recorded between March and July 1985, and released that October. Mike Scott, the album's principal songwriter and leader of the Waterboys, described This Is the Sea as "the record on which I achieved all my youthful musical ambitions"
Scott began writing songs for This Is the Sea in the spring of 1984, beginning with the song "Trumpets". Scott recalls that in December 1984 "during the Waterboys' first American tour, [he] bought two huge hard-bound books... in which to assemble [his] new songs". For the following two months Scott worked on the songs in his apartment, writing the lyrics, and working on guitar and piano arrangements. Scott wrote between 35 and 40 songs, but felt that the nine songs that made it onto the album "were the ones that were intended to be there".
The first recording session for This Is the Sea began in March 1985 at Park Gates Studio in Hastings, England with engineer and producer John Brand. Band members Scott, Anthony Thistlethwaite, Karl Wallinger, Chris Whitten, and Roddy Lorimer performed the new material. Wallinger's home studio heard demo recordings for a number of the album's songs. Some of the recordings, like the ones of the last two albums, are relatively untouched by studio engineering. On other recordings, however, Scott added a drum machine and layered the sound, using a studio technique similar to that of the famous record producer Phil Spector, with help from Wallinger. Nonetheless, it was Wallinger's second and last appearance on a Waterboys album.
Themes of the album include spirituality: "Spirit", "The Pan Within", romantic love: "Trumpets", and English politics: "Old England", while the album's eponymous single "This Is The Sea" used the allusion of the flowing river as a life affirming recognition of constant renewal and regeneration.
"Don't Bang the Drum", the lyrics of which encourage environmentalism, then the masterpiece "The Whole of the Moon", one of the Waterboys' best-known songs and their most commercially successful, was first released as a twelve-inch single, and reached number twenty-eight on the UK Singles Chart. The single also contained a live recording of "The Girl in the Swing", from The Waterboys, the band's debut album, an extended mix of "Spirit", and a song titled "Medicine Jack". The latter two appear on the second disc of the album's re-release. When the single was reissued in 1990, it reached number 3, and was awarded the Ivor Novello Award in 1991.
A feature of "The Whole of the Moon" is the trumpet work on the recording, courtesy of the classically trained Lorimer, who spent three days with Scott working on the song's arrangement. According to Lorimer, he "went home with a tape of the song and thought about a more classical approach. After a while sitting at the piano I came up with the idea of antiphonal trumpets. "Spirit", a song praising the resilience of the human spirit, originally appeared on a short, one-and-a-half minute version. The lyrics of "The Pan Within" are partly derived from meditation techniques and it was the first of two Waterboys songs about the Ancient Greek god Pan, which have been played as a medley at Waterboys concerts. The second Pan song, "The Return of Pan", appeared on the album Dream Harder. "The Pan Within" is the first Waterboys song to feature Wickham's fiddle playing.
An alternative version of "Medicine Bow" was released as a single in Germany, with an instrumental version of "Don't Bang the Drum" for the 7-inch. The 12-inch contained another mix of "Medicine Bow" and "Ways of Men". "Old England" is a criticism of Thatcherism, blaming Margaret Thatcher's economic policies for what Scott perceived to be an increase in desperation amongst the young and poor in the England of that time, and a rise in drug addiction, specifically to heroin. "Be My Enemy" is an uptempo track, heavily influenced by Bob Dylan's "Tombstone Blues" and "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream". "Trumpets", a love song, was the first song written for the album, in the spring of 1984.
The title track, the last song on the original release, has a slower tempo than most of the other arrangements. Scott notes that he wrote over twenty verses for the song, some of which wound up included on the "alter ego" of "This Is the Sea".
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