In 1977, several years before Mike Scott founded the Waterboys, the band he still leads today, he started Jungleland. At the time, he was an 18-year-old obsessed with music and literature, living in Ayr, a seaside town on the west coast of Scotland. Jungleland wasn’t a band — it was a fanzine named after a Bruce Springsteen song in which Scott wrote about the artists that enthralled him, including the Clash, Richard Hell and the Sex Pistols.

Scott, 66, has always worn his enthusiasms on his sleeve, and as the singer, songwriter, guitarist and only consistent member of the Waterboys, he has used his songs to broadcast his passions. The band’s first single from 1983, “A Girl Called Johnny,” is a breathless, saxophone-drenched ode to Patti Smith. The Waterboys’ biggest hit, “The Whole of the Moon,” is an exuberant celebration of the power of inspiration itself.

“I like to be absorbed in the things that fascinate me,” Scott said during a video call from his home in Dublin. “Then I go all the way.”

This is certainly the case with the Waterboys’ new album, “Life, Death and Dennis Hopper,” due Friday. The record follows the arc of Hopper’s life, from growing up in Kansas through the peaks and valleys of his career in Hollywood to his death in 2010. “It’s not a tribute record,” Scott said. “It’s an exploration. It’s not just Dennis’s story. It’s a story of the times.”

It’s also the kind of unconventional turn that has become a hallmark of Scott’s career. In the mid-1980s, “The Whole of the Moon” and the album that spawned it, “This Is the Sea,” showcased the Waterboys’ ability to synthesize Scott’s punk-rock influences and literary aspirations on an arena-sized scale, drawing comparisons with bands like U2 and Simple Minds, and kicking off a mini-movement named after a Waterboys song: big music. But rather than build on this success, Scott reinvented the band, decamping to Ireland, immersing himself in Celtic folk music and making an equally compelling but completely different follow-up album, “Fisherman’s Blues,” in 1988.

“It’s just my character,” Scott said. “I want to keep finding new things I can do that I couldn’t do last year. That’s my No. 1 aim. I’m like Sherlock Holmes. If he doesn’t have a case to solve, he gets depressed.”

As Scott dug into Hopper’s life, he recognized a similar creative restlessness. Although Hopper is remembered primarily for an acting career that included roles in “Rebel Without a Cause,” “Easy Rider” (which he also wrote and directed), “Apocalypse Now” and “Blue Velvet,” Scott first started thinking about his story after he stumbled on an exhibition in London dedicated to one of the actor’s side gigs, photography.

“The way he framed the pictures and decided what to shoot, I was enchanted by his eye,” he said.

Scott also saw in Hopper a dogged dedication to his muse, no matter the cost. After “Easy Rider,” Hopper made “his grand folly,” “The Last Movie.” “It was a film he got complete control of but he got so bogged down that he lost his perspective,” he said. “That reminds me of me during the ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ era.”

Scott’s Hopper fascination initially inspired a single song, a blues-pop confection appropriately titled “Dennis Hopper,” which appeared on the Waterboys’ 2020 album, “Good Luck, Seeker.” Rather than sate his curiosity, it stoked it. By early 2020, he’d written three more Hopper-focused tracks, and was thinking about releasing them as an EP.

But the songs kept coming. As pandemic lockdown took hold, Scott collaborated remotely with several members of the Waterboys, including the keyboard player James Hallawell, who became a writing partner and sounding board on the project.

“I remember Mike sending me an email saying, ‘Send me some backing tracks. I’m on fire,’” Hallawell said. “You’d send him something and you’d get something back 45 minutes later that blows your mind.”

When it became clear that what was percolating was a concept album based on Hopper’s life, Scott emailed his manager, the industry veteran Danny Goldberg, with the news. “Danny’s the master of the one-word email,” Scott said. “He wrote back and said, ‘Cool.’”

Scott was painstaking about researching his subject, reading four biographies of Hopper and digging through interviews, essays and books of Hopper’s poetry and photography. He wrote the lyrics for the opening track, “Kansas,” from the perspective of a youthful Hopper but wasn’t satisfied with the music he’d written to accompany it.

“It wasn’t American enough,” Scott said. “I needed someone with a real, authentic roots Americana sound.” He reached out to the alt-country veteran Steve Earle.

“There are very few bands I wanted to be in: the Beatles, the Stones and the Waterboys is pretty much it,” Earle said in an interview. “So, it was a no-brainer. Mike asked me for a specific thing. He needed that piece to be believable on this side of the pond. I had a lot of admiration for him as an artist to have the humility to do that.”

Earle recorded what he thought was a demo, just his grizzled voice and an acoustic guitar, but once Scott heard it, he ditched his plan to rerecord the song himself. Something similar happened with “Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend.” Scott wanted a female vocalist for the song and sent an early version to Fiona Apple. Apple had recorded a spine-tingling cover of “The Whole of the Moon” in 2019 for the finale of the Showtime series “The Affair,” which Scott called “the most emotive cover” of the song he’d ever heard. Apple sent Scott back a spare, lacerating recording of herself at the piano singing the new song with wounded fury.

“At first, we were going to record a proper band version,” Scott said. “When I received that demo, I wrote back to Fiona, ‘If you’re cool with it, we’d like to use your demo. It’s got the power.’”

Despite Scott’s status as the only permanent member of the Waterboys, the album is very much the product of this yen for collaboration, whether with one-off guests like Earle and Apple, or with others like Hallawell and Paul Brown, who are part of the current Waterboys lineup.

“I write a lot more with other people than I used to,” Scott said. “I want the song more than the ego gratification. If I have to work with this chap or this lady to get the song, that’s what I’ll do. The song is the thing.”

Much of the new material bounces between genres as it traces the timeline of Hopper’s life. “Hollywood ’55” is a playful take on midcentury cocktail lounge jazz; “Andy” marks Andy Warhol’s friendship with Hopper with a brand of smooth, Burt Bacharach-style orchestral pop; and “The Tourist” chronicles Hopper’s photographic adventures in the 1960s counterculture over a guitar-driven track awash in Jefferson Airplane vibes.

“I didn’t set out to do this, but I noticed quite early on that the songs were coming out in the vernacular of the time they were set,” Scott said.

Hopper’s drug-fueled run through the 1970s and early 1980s is conjured by the frenzied “Freakout at the Mud Palace,” which features an unhinged spoken-word vocal from Scott, and the woozy “Ten Years Gone,” which closes with a more stoic reflection voiced by Bruce Springsteen. In other places, there are meditative instrumentals, goofy skits and even a surprisingly earnest song about playing golf.

“As the spoken-word pieces were arriving, they were turning the whole thing into this kaleidoscope of a journey, like a radio play,” Hallawell explained.

Taken as a whole, the album is gleefully all over the place as it endeavors to encapsulate the broad expanse of not one but two artistic lives — Hopper’s and Scott’s.

“It’s a story of dreaming and creativity and success and hubris and a crash and then redemption,” Scott said. “That’s as old as anything.”