Riding the waves of risk
When making their new album, the members of Great Big Sea decided they had to shake things up - and ignore fans' expectations
LEAH COLLINS, Canwest News Service
Every Irish pub in the country has transformed happy hour into a Newfoundland kitchen party 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 pints 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 video shoot for its new single, Walk on the Moon, one just had to look around the set to realize the song won't be the soundtrack to hooligans getting the bum's rush at last call.
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 seen flying from the shelves, revealing images inspired by the lyrics. Considering the track is titled Walk on the Moon, we've been led to expect plenty of historical small steps that have led to giant leaps for mankind.
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 band member Bob Hallett, it's indicative of the step forward fans will notice on the new 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.
"We wrote it in Nashville a number of years ago," Doyle says during a gap in the afternoon's filming. "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, express when they reflect on the new material.
"Fear is the enemy," McCann says of the first single's theme. And, he notes, the band took that principle to heart when recording Fortune's Favour.
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," Hallett says. "We said, 'If this is going to really 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," McCann adds, "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 like 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.
While the band members say 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 version, 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 the band was lucky enough to thrive off their last gamble.
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."
Dose.ca
Fortune's Favour is scheduled for release on June 24.
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2008
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