Sea Song

Sea Song opens Rock Bottom and runs 6:31. Pitchfork's Douglas Wolk called it the magnificent and most immediately gripping piece on the album. Chris Dahlen, writing for the same site, said the melancholy that buoys it does not block its exquisite melody. Trouser Press groups it with Alifib among the album's charmingly pastoral nursery rhymes, and says a Peel Sessions recording made in September 1974 contains it too.

At the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on 8 September 1974 the audience applauded at the opening lines, and Wyatt sang with noticeably more confidence from there on. The band stretched the song into group improvisation not on the studio version, which Simon Reynolds compared to an Anglicised Bitches Brew, and Wyatt ended it with scat singing.

Tears for Fears put a cover of it on the B-side of I Believe (A Soulful Re-Recording) in 1985. Roland Orzabal said the A-side was so clearly inspired by Wyatt that a cover seemed right, and that he hoped to introduce at least one person to Wyatt's music. Rachel Unthank and the Winterset recorded it for their 2007 album The Bairns, and the Guardian's David Peschek called theirs the best version he had heard.