By Jefferson Robbins
World staff writer

Thursday, November 12, 2009

A lot of Great Big Sea’s music could sit comfortably beside U.S. pop and country ballads — but it’s much more likely to break down into a fiddle reel than a Fender solo.

The trio hailing from St. John’s, Newfoundland — Alan Doyle, Bob Hallett and Sean McCann — emerged from an isolated musical cauldron in 1993 to become a platinum-selling force in Canadian rock. The three musicians (along with fellow founder Darrell Power, who left the group in 2003) looked to the acoustic folk of their home island when crafting their accessible pop. Given where they grew up, they may have had little choice.

“Newfoundland’s a province of Canada, but it’s so distant from anything else, St. John’s is really kind of a city-state, for lack of a better word,” Hallett says by phone during a tour break in his hometown. “Even though it’s a small place, it has the trappings of a much bigger city. It developed its own arts and literary and music and drama scenes, and the tremendous energy of local, traditional music is one of the engines that drives this place.”

Newfoundland music draws together strands of Old World folk carried west by the Irish, English, Portuguese, French, Spanish and Basque fishermen, all of whom trawled for cod and hunted whales off the coasts of the island and neighboring Labrador. The island was claimed and colonized by England beginning in 1583, pushing the native Beothuk Indians to extinction to make room for planters. Great Big Sea’s music acknowledges several strands of the island’s heritage, from the yearning-for-home ballad “England” (from the 2008 CD “Fortune’s Favour”) to the ode to one of the last known Beothuk women “Demasduit Dream” (from “Turn,” 1999). And its instruments could have come over on any 18th-century fishing vessel: bouzouki, fiddle, tinwhistle, bodhran, you name it.

The recipe worked well, propelling four of Great Big Sea’s nine studio albums to million-selling status or better. Hallett and the rest of Great Big Sea — supported by longtime side players Kris MacFarlane and Murray Foster — arrive next week for a Performing Arts Center of Wenatchee performance. They’re now crafting a new CD.

Go! Magazine: A thing I notice about Great Big Sea’s music is that there’s a strong sense of history to it.

Bob Hallett: Local history is a subject of fascination to us. But also having grown up in a traditional milieu and having songs like that around us every day of our lives — when you write, you sort of tend to use those motifs and that language. We were always trying to create pop music using the language of traditional music. We were consciously trying to do something different. You start off trying to do it, and after a while, you can’t do anything else. That’s where we are now — we’ve absorbed traditional music so successfully that the line for us is very blurry now.

Go!: Tell me where you picked up on traditional songs and instruments.

Hallett: They were just in my house and in my family and my neighborhood. I didn’t have to go take a course on Sunday morning in the church basement. The stuff was all around us, all the time. It was very casual. Traditional music in Newfoundland wasn’t something, and even now isn’t something, that people felt was important. It was just the music, in the way that for most people in North America now, rock ’n’ roll is the music that they hear every day. ... When my parents had parties, people sang Elvis songs and hymns and Hank Williams songs, and a lot of what they sang was traditional music, but they wouldn’t necessarily have made that distinction. Obviously, I went out of my way to learn how to play these instruments, but to some degree, the spirit of it was by osmosis.

Go!: Would your folks have characterized themselves as musicians?

Hallett: Not at all, even though they both played and sang. Music was and is still very participatory in Newfoundland, and although people listen to CDs, it’s more important to know how to do it. How well you do it is less important than your ability to participate, in some sense, and they were both very enthusiastic participants. But I think that would’ve been the extent of it, as far as they were concerned. The fact that they knew something old, something important, something unusual — they were just playing songs at parties with the neighbors around Christmastime or whatever. There was no self-conscious preservationist agenda going on there, that’s for sure.

Go!: When you’re writing new music, how do you determine whether a song demands a traditional approach, or whether it’s a straightforward pop song?

Hallett: They often seem to find their own head. Myself and Sean and Alan will sit down with Kris and Murray, the bass and drum players in our band, and work on it a bit more, and they often sort of find their own way very quickly. We’ve learned over the years that songs are gonna go in the direction they’re gonna go, and our attempts to push them one way or pull them another have often failed. The ones that live very comfortably in the traditional world are obvious right from the very first time you sing them. Whether it’s the melody or the lyrics, I don’t know. It’s so often not a conscious decision on our part. They just kind of drifted that way.

Go!: Do your songs tend to come together on pen and paper, or in rehearsal?

Hallett: Rarely do we sort of jam together on stage, live. Our music is sort of heavily arranged, for lack of a better word. But when we’re playing them together, they very quickly assume their own form. Everyone brings their own instruments to the table, and chooses what and how they’re gonna play. So the result is often not necessarily what I as a writer wanted, or what I was thinking would happen, but the results are usually better for that kind of collective treatment. If people are doing something they want to do, they’re going to do it enthusiastically, and they’re gonna do it every night. Whereas if everybody’s just playing what I tell them to, or vice versa, then people will get bored. It doesn’t have the same value at all.

Go!: Does it ever go to the opposite extreme, where someone brings in a song idea and the collective determines that it’s not going to work?

Hallett: Oh, all the time. For the last two records, even the one we’re working on now, we must have 60 songs on the table. There’s no way we’re doing a quadruple album, no matter how attracted we are to our own ideas. Somewhere along the way, in the next two weeks, there’s gonna be a great winnowing. But bad ideas die quickly, but a good idea really never goes away, so the songs that were not just quite good enough or were lacking a certain something often come to the fore a record or two down the road. “Walk On the Moon,” on the “Fortune’s Favour” record, was quite an older song, really. It just didn’t find the right way to play itself, and when it did, it was like, “Bang on, this is great.”

Go!: Lyrically, there’s a segment of your songs that have a storytelling or narrative element. Is that an emphasis for you, or is that coming from elsewhere in the band?

Hallett: Personally, for me, that’s the songs I’m most interested in — songs that tell a story. A lot of the best traditional music is about stories. In Newfoundland historically, people didn’t write novels or plays or make great sculptures. The way they recorded the great events in their lives and in their world was in the form of songs. We sort of speak to that tradition and that idea, whenever we’re writing. We’re self-consciously trying to create songs that stand up to that legacy. The songs we’re playing now, in theory, should be just as good now as the ones that we learned that are 400 years old.

Newfoundland is physically isolated,” says Great Big Sea member Bob Hallett, right. “So we were basically just left alone to develop our own music.” The trio has sold millions of records by interpolating Newfoundland’s traditional music forms into modern rock hits. Great Big Sea — with Hallett alongside Sean McCann, left, and Alan Doyle — plays the Performing Arts Center of Wenatchee on Nov. 19.

Great Big Sea onstage, in longer-haired days. The band’s Wenatchee date comes during preparations for a new CD, following the 2008 album “Fortune’s Favour.”

Great Big Sea’s three main members, at right, are joined onstage and on record by Murray Foster, left, and Kris MacFarlane.