>>PREVIEW
GREAT BIG SEA
In the 12 years that audiences have been gleefully singing and dancing to the music of Canada’s official party band, the members of Great Big Sea have seen a lot of changes in the music industry. A proliferation of music available on the Internet, the emergence of DVDs and the vaguely sci-fi sounding trend of podcasts have kept musicians everywhere on their toes. Through it all, the ever-savvy businessmen of Great Big Sea have always known how to sell their music.
With seven albums under their belt, extensive radio and music video airplay and a band record for ticket sales during last year’s Something Beautiful tour (approximately 10,000 in Gananoque, Ontario), Great Big Sea thrives by giving audiences what they want. With their patented feel-good blend of pop-rock and traditional music, the band bestows audience members with honorary citizenship in the musical mecca of Newfoundland, if only for an evening.
So it makes sense that Newfoundland’s favourite sons would want to continue staying ahead of the trends and come up with the next best thing. In the case of Great Big Sea, this means going back in time with their eighth release, The Hard and the Easy, comprised entirely of traditional Newfoundland tunes, performed acoustically, almost exactly like you’d hear at an East Coast kitchen party.
For some, the lack of radio-friendly hits might come as a shock, especially from a band that has done so well with commercial play. However lead-singer Alan Doyle is confident that the economic theory of supply and demand will work in their favour.
"We do all our records for people to buy and listen to, and I’d be facetious and lying if I didn’t admit that," he says. "People have asked us in so many ways for this record for a long time. People love hearing us sing songs from our own backyard, and this was a great chance to do a whole record full of them."
Bandmate Bob Hallett is also confident that fans will be happy with this latest project, even though it deviates from the group’s successful musical formula of the past.
"We haven’t thrown this wild curveball at our audience," he says. "We’ve distilled down the basic elements, which is the three of us just singing and playing together. Yeah, we’ve abandoned Top 40 radio, but we haven’t abandoned any of the ideals that have made the band popular in the first place."
Yet deciding to release an album of traditionally arranged Newfoundland tunes wasn’t a fear-free process.
"I’m terrified that people might think this is an educational effort on our part," admits Hallett. "But this is supposed to be entertaining. We want people to buy it and enjoy it and have fun with this stuff. It’s not about educating our audience or trying to give them some nutritious folk values. These are other good songs we’ve never recorded and we think they are just as good as the stuff we’ve done in the past."
While an album of 12 traditional songs might seem a bit sparse given the rich history of songwriting in Newfoundland, Doyle and Hallett, who along with fellow founding-member Séan McCann hand-picked the tunes for The Hard and the Easy, say this is simply a sampling of favourites.
"We started with 15 tunes and it just happened to be pared down to the 12 that we happened to record the best," says Doyle. "We could do a record like this every year for the rest of our lives, and there would still be a thousand songs that weren’t recorded."
While this latest project has little in common with last year’s popular rock release, Something Beautiful, the band prefers not to dwell on the differences, but to focus on the common thread in all their music.
Doyle sums it up perfectly. "When my folks sang songs at parties when I was little, my mom would sing some old song from God knows where, dad would sing an Elvis song, my uncle would sing a song he wrote the day before, then they’d do some shanty from Petty Harbour. No one ever stopped to think that these were four completely separate sources of music," he says. "They’re just good songs."
FOLK & WORLD
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