The Great Big Sea sing-along

For these Canadian Celtic rockers, folk music is a participatory event

By Andy Hermann

Metromix

It’s impossible to talk about the music of Canadian folk-rockers Great Big Sea without talking about the island of Newfoundland that the band’s three founding members and co-leaders—Bob Hallett, Sean McCann and Alan Doyle—all call home. “Newfoundland’s a very interesting place,” says Hallett, whose family has lived there for 350 years. “The geography’s very harsh, but the culture that’s grown up despite that, or around that, is very warm and very welcoming.”

That warmth reaches the back row at every one of Great Big Sea’s concerts, which tend to become giant sing-alongs, as the band tears through a mix of Celtic-tinged original tunes and rowdy versions of traditional folk songs and sea shanties. The high-energy, participatory shows have helped the band acquire what Hallett immodestly but accurately refers to as “our massive live following in America and Canada.”

Shortly after the release of the band’s tenth and latest album, “Fortune’s Favour,” and before an extensive U.S. tour, Hallett—who speaks with a Newfoundlander’s faintly Irish-sounding lilt—called from his home in the Newfoundland capital of St. John’s to talk about Great Big Sea’s deep cultural roots and chaotic recording process.

You guys are huge in Canada and considered more of a cult band in the U.S.—yet you’re filling venues on this tour like the 2,100-seat Nokia Theater in Times Square.
Yeah, that’s as good as it gets, really. I know from talking to American bands, so many of them who aren’t at the top level—they would donate kidneys to get that kind of thing. It’s like, OK, we’re not on “Letterman,” but at the end of the day, who cares? How many people came to see you, that’s what really matters—not how bright your flash in the pan was.

You’re from Newfoundland, which is a part of Canada I suspect most Americans aren’t that familiar with.
I suspect that’s a fair assumption.

So what’s it like?
It’s probably the only English-speaking nation left in North America—that hasn’t become homogenized. It’s isolated. It’s an island that’s a long way away from everything else—closer to Europe than much of North America. And the result is this kind of mid-Atlantic culture that doesn’t really exist anywhere else—a place where older ideas about culture predominate, and a place that many of the key events that formed North America had no impact whatsoever.

I was surprised to learn that it was an independent country at one time.
Well, all of our parents were born in the Dominion of Newfoundland, not Canada. We’re first-generation Canadians, despite having not ever moved anywhere.

You describe the culture of Newfoundland as being “mid-Atlantic.” So the Celtic influence in your music really comes from Newfoundland itself, more than from Ireland?
Well, the Irish people in Newfoundland have been here for three or four hundred years, as have the English and the French. And the music of the three founding cultures, as it were, has become blended in funny ways over the years. [But] what makes Newfoundland really different is that folk music here is still a part of the popular culture. Unlike Canada, where in most of Canada—and I know much of America [too]—folk music is something obscure and either academic or a little bit silly. In Newfoundland, folk music is popular music. So what we do, the kind of blending of in eclectic fashion of folk instruments and traditional sounds with pop stuff, is very much the model that many musicians operate [under] here. Whereas you could grow up in much of Canada and America and never hear any folk music.

And what little folk music most Americans do get exposed to, their image of it is a guy sitting on a stool, strumming an acoustic guitar.
[Laughs] Indeed.

But you guys are known for almost the opposite. Your live shows can get pretty raucous.
The way folk music happened for us when we were children, it wasn’t formal. It wasn’t an academic exercise or an ethnic exercise, you know? We didn’t have to put on a special costume on the weekends and go to a class in a church basement. People played and sang traditional music all around us all the time, and what was important was to participate…[not] being a virtuoso. If you came to a party, you had to do something—you weren’t just sitting there watching other people do it, you had to join in. We try to bring that aesthetic to our concerts. We encourage people to join in—and that sounds really simple, but for many people these days, they don’t have a chance to sing and dance, so it’s a really unusual event for them.

I like that the liner notes for “Fortune’s Favour” actually said that you couldn’t remember who played what on each track. It sounds like a pretty chaotic recording process.
It was very chaotic. And our producer, this guy Hawksley Workman, is such a gadfly—just one of these guys who’s just this creative bomb going off all the time. So it was very much a case of, let’s not talk about this for even 10 seconds—if you have an idea, we’re not gonna wait around for the saxophone guy to show up. If you have three notes that fit, go in and play those three notes. So there was a lot of, the closest guy to the door was the guy who played whatever part. And then we just sort of knit it all together later. [So] it’s kind of tough to say who did what.