Great Big Sea 2008

“Man, am I glad I live in a small town” says Sean McCann, multi-instrumentalist of Great Big Sea after just getting in town, being hustled to interviews and being stuck in the endless Toronto traffic. After all that, Sean was more than happy to kick back in his hotel room and speak to me at length about such things as the band’s new album “Fortune’s Favour”, the state of the music industry and Montreal Canadien great Bob Gainey… you’ll just have to read on to see how we got on that topic.

David : You just got into Toronto and you’ve been doing tons of press for the new album I understand. I thought the band had re-located to Toronto a number of years back ?

Sean : No, you know everyone thinks that.  And Warner Brothers sure wanted that when we signed with them 12 years ago but we told them the whole point to this was to take your money and we can all buy homes in St.John’s.

David : Congratulations on the new album. I heard the album yesterday and I think it’s really good.

Sean : Awesome, thanks! You don’t think it’s too far off the pace?

David : No, and that’s something I wanted to ask you in a bit… that being that I was really pleased to hear the band push the envelope and try something new.

Sean : Well that’s something we set out to do, to not make the same album again. We realized that way would be the end

David : It’s easy for bands to fall into that Ramones type trap isn’t it, to keep repeating success while musically staying stagnant ?

Sean : Yeah well the Ramones are an interesting choice of bands because I am a big fan of theirs and your right; they did one thing real well. I guess we could have done that. We have always tried to try different things, to be honest we had a bunch of songs written and we kind of knew what the album would have sounded like if we recorded it like that way and we were going to record that album and we decided to sit down one day and ask each other “what do you think ?”

I knew what Allan thought before he said it and I knew what Bob thought before he said it , and they knew what I thought. and then we all thought “we’re in a lot of danger here”.  We are going to make a very predictable record and none of us will be happy”. So we thought we needed someone else to come in and intervene and that was Hawksley, who we thought was perfect for the job.

David : I wanted to ask you about that. Obviously the addition of Hawksley Workman as producer seems like an interesting choice as producer. Was there a specific reason why you went with Hawksley ?

Sean : I’ve been a fan of his for years.  The band I am in is not generally what I listen to. I have kind of weird tastes. We were all aware of Hawksley and he had opened for us several times.  But we were really attracted to his production abilities and we had a sense that was where his soul was, in production.  We met with him a couple of times and talked and he just got it right away.  We told him what we thought our problem was, and he agreed and came on board and his approach was to find out how we used to do things. And he said ok, we are going to go through different musical paths here and we are going to record things differently.  And there will be nothing the same about this recording, and that’s why this album sounds like nothing we’ve done before.

Luckily for us he has a great taste for lyrics and songs.  He likes big sounds… nothing small and he likes big themes.  He managed to take our pallet and blow it apart big time.

David : The album seems to have many different influences yet maintains a cohesive feel to it and the album even includes a great rocker in "Oh Yeah".

Sean : Well “Oh Yeah” started off as a lark.  And when recording with Hawksley the stuff we ended up keeping was the stuff we were playing before we thought he had pressed the record button.  He would trick us and we would go in and play stuff, stuff we were playing for fun we thought, and he would let us noodle around and he would say “ok, your done”.  And we would say “Ummm, we haven’t started yet”.  And he would say “You’ve got a good song started here”.  And we were like “What are you talking about?”  And that was weird for us but we managed to surrender our collective will to him, we let him do what he wanted to do.

David : You have such a loyal fan base.  Does that make it easier to try different things knowing that your fans will follow you ?

Sean : Well hopefully they will and we have a strong fan base and they are very loyal to us.  But I think with every record we put out there are always people who think “Ah, that’s a bit weird”.  And they become divided on that.  Speaking of “Fortune’s Favour”, we are fortune enough to have that solid fan base, but there is a responsibility for us to not do the same thing over and over.  That would not be good for us and not good for our fans.  We have a responsibility to bring the fans in to where our musical hearts really are at the time and Hawksley managed to find that, and I’m glad he did.

David : There have been a lot of great bands come out of the Maritimes.  What is it about GBS that you have been able to endure, and still be as vital and relevant to the Canadian music scene ?

Sean : Well, we were always very ambitious.  We were never the best musicians but I think we really wanted it more than the others. We were ambitious beyond our means but our goal was to be together as a band forever and have this be a career band and be important and something to talk about, to make music people liked and wanted to listen to and be the soundtrack to peoples lives.  Now these are big concepts and big ideas but we never thought of this as a summer thing or a two year thing.  It was always long term.  It’s weird, we started late as far as bands go.  I mean I was 26 when we started but we never thought this would be a piece of my life or a small part of it.  We thought this would be our life.

David : Your live shows are known to be some of the most energetic and exciting performances anyone could witness. After 15 or so years, how does the band still make the live show interesting for themselves as well as their fans ?

Sean : Well we have to rely heavily on Advil now ! That’s what we love to do; we are not great lovers of the studio.  We’re like animals and animals don’t like to be caged.  We live to roam on the stage.  That’s always been our thing and we always try to endeavor to be healthy to be able to do that and we love doing it.  A lot of artists don’t like doing it like that but we’re not in that camp… we are the opposite.  We live for this and luckily for us in today’s musical world, that’s all we have left to earn an income from and I guess that’s why we are one of the few survivors.  As record sales dwindle, unless you have a good live show your career will be over.

David : Does it get harder as you get older to maintain that level of a live show?

Sean : You start to feel the aches and pains.  You start to be careful and you realize you can’t play with the kids like you used to.  Every time I go on stage the fire in the belly just goes off and I always over extend myself.  I play too loud, sing too loud, hurt myself every night but I come home from a 3 week tour and I am burnt.  Then I take 2 weeks to sleep it off and the wife fixes me up and then I’m off again.

David : On your first couple Canadian tours, was there the luxury of having an almost built in audience ready to see you, considering there seems to be Maritime transplants scattered all over the country ?

Sean : It certainly helped.  They were always there for us, but as you get further and further away like in California… you see there is always one, always one wherever you go. That was a huge benefit when we first started but as you get into the States, Europe that support isn’t really there because it seems the concentration of Maritime people are like in Alberta, B.C. and Toronto.  And we would show up in Calgary in the early days and have a couple hundred people out to see us.  

David : I have to ask you about winter 2006, where your tour bus tipped over outside of Vancouver. Thankfully there were no serious injuries, but did it give you cause to pause and think about life at all or was it just another one of those things that happened on tour and you choose not to reflect on it ?

Sean : I was the only one not on the bus! We didn’t think much of it at the time as we had a show.  We had to get all of our gear off the side of the highway and into this theater.  And shortly thereafter we really found ourselves talking about it.  It plays on your mind and we have a bus run next week and you know what ?  I’m taking a flight from Calgary to Vancouver !  I remember Allan making the joke at the time because I don’t like traveling through the mountains, you don’t sleep very well… I’m not scarred but I just wanted to sleep.  So Allan was saying to me in jest “Remember Buddy Holly” and that freaked me out and sure enough my brother calls the next day and is like “Dude the bus is on its side on the highway”.  You never know when your clock’s gonna run out.

David : On the new album you have songs like "Banks of Newfoundland" and "Rocks of Merasheen". Tell me about the origin of such songs that reference specific places.  Were they based upon actual experiences or maybe old stories ?

Sean : The “Rocks of Merasheen” was actually written by two guys from the 70’s. Al Pittman who is no longer with us, and Ken Burns who is still with us and it sounds like a traditional Maritime song.  Marasheen is an island off the coast of Placentia, and it was a place where people fished and lived.  But in the 50’s during confederation, people were forced to leave and re-settle to Placentia which is more centralized.  They were pretty much forced to leave, and a lot of them sailed across the bay and dragged their houses behind them.  So it was a real dramatic experience for them.  The song is really about these young men at the time, and now they are looking back on what happened.  It still goes on today with Newfoundlanders having to re-locate to Alberta and other places.

“Banks of Newfoundland” we first heard from a guy named Dermott O’Reilly who recently passed away.  He sang it, and it’s a very dark song.  It’s pretty blood and guts and we were drawn to it.  Hawksley, he really got a feel for it and he really did a great job producing it.  And most sea chanteys are sung over a pint, but he managed to catch the underlying darkness to it.

David : Being a music retailer, I have to ask what your feeling is on the subject of downloading music for free? Do you think it has hurt a band like Great Big Sea ?

Sean : Oh very much.   We’ve seen records sales go from 500,000 to sometimes 100,000 now and that’s a big cost to us but at the same time we sell more concert tickets now.  We know we are more popular so it’s not our fault or something we are doing wrong.  It’s just that you can get it for free now and I wish you couldn’t.  I really do.  I miss that income you know ?  And I’m starting to miss record stores.  I like to go in and buy them.  I’m one of those guys.  I still collect vinyl.  I’m a music addict, but to pretend it’s not happening, which is what the record companies did, has proven to be quite a mistake.  We support retail big time.  We discourage pirating but what we try to do now is, our business is really about concert tickets now.  That’s been our focus.  We are still on a record label but I don’t know where our future will take us.  We make our stuff available legally online, but there is no guarantee that people are going to legally take it from iTunes you know and get it from somewhere else.

David : Can the industry rebound do you think ?

Sean : The industry has to evolve.  The industry has to diversify and offer people something they can’t download.  With this new CD we included a bonus DVD that has us in the studio.  We allowed a guy in to shoot it and we let him do what he does.  You wouldn’t have had to do that a few years ago, but now… it’s a costly thing to.  That DVD cost us like $10,000 to do.  We wanted to go out there with something special to offer, so we put something in there which we hope will make it easier for you to sell.  You gotta go out and fight for those sales.

David : When going on tour, what are some of the CD's that you have to have on tour with you ?

Sean : I’ve got like a huge collection of CD’s, like 4000 and about 1000 vinyl records.  I don’t throw anything away.  So I get an iPod for Christmas a few years ago and I’m thinking this is great.  So I start burning off CD’s right into my iPod which turned out to be a chore because you put it on random and you end up skipping half the songs.  You know this is where artists share some blame too.  Don’t make albums with 2 good songs and the rest are shit.  Filler is not what we need.

So for the past 2 years, I literally have 7000 songs on the player and I’ve painfully gone through and at least taken one song from every CD I own, and I’ve still got about 600 CD’s to go.  So know I can honestly say there are about 7000 songs and not one song I don’t like.  But that takes time, that’s dedication.  So what’s happened is, my iPod is GBS’s go-to for music.  I bring it on the road and plug it on the bus.  So I’ve been entrusted with that.

So what’s on it ? Lots of Johnny Cash, Bob Marley, The Clash… lots of rootsy organic stuff, good stuff.  Lots of 80’s stuff.  What were we listening to the other day… oh yeah, the Dream Academy.  And we are all over the place musically.  And I’m the most whacky with my tastes so they know it’s never a dull moment.

David : Do your different influences ever creep in to GBS’s music?

Sean : Oh yeah, not always very successful.  You know, it gets in there.  Heart Of Stone is one of my songs.  Hard Case, Dream To Live, Long Lost Love are all mine and not any of them would normally make it onto a GBS album, and our referee this time was sympatric to me on this album.

David : You have played countless number of live shows, throughout the years.  Is there one show that stands out in your mind as something extra ordinary ?  And speaking of which, can you tell me one story of the strangest experiences you have had on stage ?

Sean : Oh, that’s a good one.  Well I can tell you my memory isn’t so good these days as I’ve managed to sandbag it with liquor over the years.  But last fall we went to one of the scariest things I’ve ever had to do.  We were asked to sing at Bob Gainey’s number retirement in Montreal.  He likes GBS and it fact we are doing a benefit for his charity with Sam Roberts right away.

So he invited us to sing the anthems right, which we have done in the past, not a lot of late.  Anyways, Montreal is a whole other phenomenon for hockey as you might know.  So we go there and we realize that if we don’t do a good job, we are going to get booed so we were really nervous.  So we meet Bob Gainey for a drink before and he told us “Guys, you really gotta calm down”.  So here I am in the locker room with Bob teaching us how to sing the national anthem, which was charming of him.

So we went out and did a good job and I come back with my pants full if you know what I mean, I was really nervous.  So I go upstairs and I’m hanging out with the old guys like Guy Carboneau, Doug Risebrough, Phil Esposito, you know these types of guys.  I’m having the time of my life you know, and it comes time for Bob to go out on the ice and do his thing and retire his jersey.  He chose to walk out in skates and full uniform minus the helmet, which I don’t think he wore a lot anyways back then.  And he skated around and the place went mad !  I know it wasn’t our show, but that was one of the best shows man I’ve seen.  It was like a Roman coliseum !

I was so moved by that.  I am not a lunatic fan like Allan and Bob, but that really motivated me to think outside the box, because he didn’t have to do that.  And what he did is, he rallied the people do much on his side.  That the emotion was tangible, and it just rocked my world.  I’ve been to U2 concerts and Bono is great at that, but this was right up there.  This was better !

David : After so many years of great success, what motivates the band now and at this point in your career how do you define success as a band ?

Sean : What you have to do is not be complacent.  You can’t be afraid to follow your musical muse.  You gotta look for the best songs, and you have to be prepared to work really hard, and you also really have to want it.  The worst thing that can happen is to be afraid of change or of trying something new.  That’s what musicians are in charge of doing.  We are the ones who fuck up so no one else has to.  We are supposed to be out there and taking those risks.  And if we stop doing that then we will suffer.

David : Is it harder to maintain success than it was obtaining it ?

Sean : Yeah.  It is in this environment because of downloading. The ripple effect not only in retail but with the record companies… you see less bands you know, because there are less promoters out there, and the venues have gotten smaller.  Every band out there is competing for the same thing, bums in the seats.  Like we just found out that Calgary is the busiest place for big time entertainment.  So when we go there we are challenged to find a date,  As now, we are challenged by Van Halen and Elton John.  And before it was Blue Rodeo and The Odds you know, so the traffic is at it’s height because rooms are so far and in between to find.  And the acts are all out there now.

David : When you tour the U.S., what's the reaction you get down there ? There has to be a different element to the band they are drawn to, considering they might not understand the Maritime influence of the band.

Sean : Back to your earlier question… there is no Maritime base to draw on.  But traditional type folk Newfoundland music they are not used to.  Now we have had great success down there.  60% of our business is down there and a lot of cities down there are bigger for us than in Canada.

It’s taken a while but we kept it up down there, and played the festival circuit and really worked hard.  For example we can do 1000 people in L.A.  We can do 2500 in Minnesota and Chicago, and we have like 50 American cities like that.  That’s just us working and working it you know ?  We have huge numbers in D.C., New York, and Boston and down the eastern seaboard.

David : Is it harder to market the band with what seems to be the death of the music video ? There really aren’t any outlets to have your video played now.

Sean : Yeah, I mean music video stations don’t play videos anymore.  And what’s happened is, our enemy the internet has become our friend kind of, with places like YouTube, which is a different way to see a video but we’ve made a video for this new album “Walk On The Moon”.  But now you kind of give it away.  It’s a crap-shoot now.  It’s still quite expensive to make an album and shoot a video, and this is why downloading is wrong and the internet is what it is.  So we have to eek it out and show the video on our website and places like that, and try to get people to see it.

David : You’re doing some secret shows across Canada.  Is this just something fun to do, or was there another reason behind them ?

Sean : This is kind of like putting ourselves in uncomfortable positions to do something different.  And we came from the pubs, and it’s been a while since we’ve had to wrestle with the pub-going crowd.  And I’m looking forward to it and it’s going to be hard.  We are a big act now and there is a lot of stuff that we won’t be able to depend on in these pubs.  So it will be very bare bones, very intense.  We want it to be a very honest and broken down show, and bring it back to where we started.  It won’t be easy for us but that’s good for us.

David : So what’s the game plan for the rest of 2008 ?

Sean : Well its back on tour.  The official tour starts in August, and its right through until 2009.  And plans are this year, for our album to come out in Australia.  So hopefully we can get down there.  And that may be in the winter, so we can avoid any northern tours around then.  So we are booked all the way through.  So it’s busy, busy, busy.

Great Big Sea

Calgary : 932 17 Ave. S.W.     Edmonton : 10355 Whyte Ave.