Great big changes for Great Big Sea

Leah Collins ,  canada.com

For their upcoming album, Fortune's Favour, Great Big Sea say they went in with one guiding principle: 'Fear is the enemy.' Check back to Canada.com every week until June 24 for exclusive Great Big Sea webisodes about the making of the record

Every Irish pub in the country has transformed happy hours into Newfoundland kitchen parties with a spin of Great Big Sea on the jukebox. The band's raucous, celtic-tinged catalogue - now reaching back 15 years - has spawned numerous bar anthems for those who prefer their pints to be of the Guinness variety. Songs like "The Night Paddy Murphy Died," "When I'm Up (I Can't Get Down)" and "Ordinary Day" have become Canadian pub staples. But at the band's latest video shoot for new single "Walk on the Moon," one just had to look around the set to realize the track won't be the soundtrack to hooligans getting the bum's rush from George St. taverns.

Set up amid the antiques and old lace of an Edwardian parlour, singer Alan Doyle is emoting for cameras behind a baby grand. The piano's been artfully strewn with antique books - and once the video is ready for TV, those volumes will be flying from the shelves, revealing images inspired by the lyrics. Considering the track's titled "Walk on the Moon," we've been led to expect plenty of historical small steps that have led to giant leaps for mankind. (See video of our time on set, here)

The song itself is a giant leap for the group. It's a sweeping piano pop ballad, with bells (literally) and whistles (not so literally) and orchestral arrangements. According to the band's Bob Hallett, it's indicative of the step forward fans will notice on the album, Fortune's Favour - out June 24.

"To a degree we've always tried to walk down the line between folk music and pop music, but this one really embraces pop music in a massive fashion," Hallett says. "It's more about using every sound at our disposal to their ultimate end, and not being afraid to make things weird."

As for the single, it was written years before the band decided to go in new directions - whipped up by Doyle with help from long-time friend and fellow Maritimer Gordie Sampson. (Sampson, incidentally, just scooped up a Grammy for co-writing Carrie Underwood's crossover hit, "Jesus Take the Wheel.")

"We wrote it in Nashville a number of years ago," says Doyle during a gap in the afternoon's filming. "And it was - it was very much -- we wanted to write a song that expressed the whole idea our days are numbered and you should make the most of every day you get."

That's roughly the same sentiment Doyle's bandmates Sean McCann and Bob Hallett expresses when they reflect on the new material.

"Fear is the enemy," says McCann of the first single's theme. And, he notes, the band took that principle to heart when recording Fortune's Favour.

"If you're safe all the time and you're afraid of challenging yourself, this is not the record that would've been made," says McCann.

Great Big Sea's first big challenge was working with a new producer. The band's previous album, 2005's The Hard and the Easy, was a self-produced affair. Around the time of that release, they had reportedly said they'd hoped to do the same on the follow-up since they'd had so much fun producing that record. It was also, it turned out, comfortable - a little too comfortable for the band's liking once they began workshopping demos for Fortune's Favour.

"When we started doing it ourselves it really felt like 'You know what I'm going to say and I know what you're going to say,' and before we'd even started we'd already had you know, 15 different arguments about how it's going to go," says Hallett. "We said, 'If this is going to be really to be interesting, if it's going to sound different if it's going to be exciting, if we're going to step forward, we need to bring someone in and we need to let them take the reins.'"

"It's called hiring a referee," says McCann, piping in, "and we got a great one in Hawksley, for sure."

That would be Hawksley Workman, the Juno-winner you probably know best from his cabaret-glam hits such as "Striptease" and "Jealous of Your Cigarette," but who's become a sought-after producer, thanks to work with artists from Sarah Slean to Tegan and Sara.

And while the band says they initially struggled with surrendering their vision to an outside producer, the only real conflict they had with Workman was trying to convince him to put his stamp on "Walk on the Moon."

The original, says the band, was a very introspective, muted acoustic piece - and Workman wasn't a fan. "When we started work on it, it wasn't a song he was particularly interested in."

But after some arguing - and, jokes McCann, some "physical intimidation" - they had their producer on board. "When we got started there were no small sounds made, it was just bang, bang, crash, timpani - things we never would have done on our own," says McCann.

"The original was very acoustic and very personal and now it's this massive, orchestral, huge, Disney statement," says Hallett.

It sounds big, but to many long-time followers it might not sound like Great Big Sea - which the band concedes.

"What's risky about [the album] is the songs, none of them were written with the fan in mind, per se, and that's a dangerous thing to do," says Hallett, although he notes that the band was lucky enough to thrive off their last gamble. Their last album, The Hard and the Easy, was, Hallett says, "a vanity project" - a collection of traditional songs from their home province of Newfoundland.

"That was career suicide," says Hallett, "and to be honest, we expected to sell 2,000 copies of that record and we sold platinum."

"We need to push ourselves. Whatever we do, this can't be safe - and even if it's rotten. Better to do something bad than something boring."

Check back to Canada.com every week for video from the making of Great Big Sea's new album, Fortune's Favour. We'll have a new exclusive webisode from the band every week leading up to the CD's June 24 release.