Often, when one member of a popular band goes solo, that individual wonders how long it will take fans to accept them on their own merits. For Alan Doyle, he has been pleasantly surprised at how quickly he has carved out a unique identity as an independent artist, while still retaining the loyalty and affection of long-time friends of his former band Great Big Sea.
Doyle, who released his second solo album, So Let’s Go, last year to both critical and popular acclaim, continues to be an in-demand draw as a liver performer, and wraps up another busy summer season with a date at the Trenton Scottish Irish Festival on Sept. 9, followed by a date at the Magna Hoedown in Aurora, ON on Sept. 16 in between dates throughout other parts of Canada and the U.S.A.
“I try to take three or four weekends off to stay with the family and stuff but all the rest I work and really chase all these fun festivals all around North American and Europe, and this year’s no different. For me, summers have always lived outside the normal album touring cycle and you’re all over the place doing these awesome festival shows, mostly outdoors and I think it’s like that for most musicians here. I always say the funnest place to be in the music business in the summer is [Toronto’s] Pearson Airport on a Saturday morning; you’re watching every band in Canada running like crazy people from one gig to the next to make it to the next festival,” Doyle said from his home in St. John’s, where he commented on the fact that people are starting to come to an appreciation for his music outside of any influence from Great Big Sea.
“It’s funny, I was wondering when I started playing on my own how long it would take before I had sort of new people, because I was hoping that, fingers crossed, many if not all of the Great Big Sea fans would follow me eventually. And thankfully they have, but much earlier than I imagined people are showing up and discovering Great Big Sea through me, especially folks in the United States.
“I think that’s because the music down there is kind of compartmentalized a little more than it is in Canada. In Canada you might hear Our Lady Peace and Great Big Sea on the same radio station or on the same stage, whereas in the U.S. you wouldn’t. And now that I have a couple of records out [his debut album Boy on Bridge was released in 2012] I think people are literally discovering me and then going back and discovering Great Big Sea, which is awesome. It’s excellent. I am delighted if people come and want to hear some Great Big Sea songs. We all love playing them.”
Doyle said he was surprised that a song from So Let’s Go has become a true blue party anthem and is now a concert highlight alongside some of the biggest hits by Great Big Sea.
“There’s some of the most Celtic and most traditional music I have ever made on that record. The big crowd drinking song 1,2,3,4 has become sort of the hit of the night now. And I never ever thought that I would be able to write or come up with a party drinking anthem that would top the ones in the Great Big Sea catalogue. That was never going to happen as far as I was concerned and it has in the weirdest way. So you never know what’s around the corner, man,” he said.
Doyle is in the process of working on a new album as well as a new book. He published his first, Where I Belong, in 2012. It is an endearingly homespun tale of his early life in the small remote fishing village of Petty Harbour Newfoundland. The next one is an as yet untitled sequel.
“The working title of the next book is A Newfoundlander in Canada. The first book was about me growing up in a little fishing town and making my way to the big city of St. John’ and starting Great Big Sea with the guys. This one is getting with Great Big Sea and driving from St. John’s to Victoria on our first coast-to-coast tour and what Canada looked like to me as a guy who had never been anywhere. What did Canada look like in 1994 out the window of a station wagon through the lens of a 23-year-old musician who had really only ever been to Petty Harbour and St. John’s?” he said.
The new music is much of what you would expect from Alan Doyle – a perfect mix of the traditional and the contemporary, with fun, frivolity, sentiment and sadness in equal measure, all wrapped up by his unmistakable deeply gruff but emotive voice, and the amazing playing of his band The Beautiful Gypsies.
“I have about a third of the book written and about 10 songs recorded. Most likely what I will do is record 15 or 16 and probably
use the 10 best. And all the songs I have done so far, they’re heavily driven by the concerts. They are songs that I think will make the best concert songs. There is a friend of mine in Nashville who I wrote a lot of songs with and he said, ‘Alan, you have never written a song for the radio or for the record in your life. Every one you write is for the concert stage.’ And I think that’s true and it’s going to be a very Celtic-based rock and roll vibe on this records, because that’s what I do and that’s what goes down best live for me and my band,” Doyle explained.
“I am so really loving playing with the band. They are such a great collection of players and people that I am very cleverly crafting songs where each one of them has something awesome to do on stage. And frankly I never really cared about writing for a radio hit. I really wouldn’t know how to do one anyways and it’s always been the case for me and for Great Big Sea. It’s not like we won the Billboard Magazine aware one year or something because we had the hit of the summer. It’s always been just a little outside the circle and in a way that’s not all bad. That band never had to and I never had to live up to some machine that I created because I had the number one song in the world.
“Don’t get me wrong, I would love to have the number one song in the world. That would be awesome and I would love to have a song on my new record that every radio station in every genre in the country would play as often as Taylor Swift. It would be awesome because people would get to hear it more. But it’s never been a hardship of mine that the concert is the master that I serve first, because it’s always been that way. I grew up playing music in kitchens in Petty Harbour. Recording those songs was a distant possibility when I was learning, much less recording them and having them played on the radio. I write songs to sing them for people and I am still very happy doing that.”
As a young, impressionable singer/songwriter, Doyle was heavily influenced by the traditional Newfoundland music and some of the top troubadours from the region. At the top of the list was the brilliant but mercurial tunesmith Ron Hynes. Considered to be one of the most enigmatic but true and authentic voices from The Rock. Hynes died in November of 2015 and his loss is still reverberating through the halls and homes of Newfoundland and Labrador.
“It was a damn shame. I was a fan mostly. If he was on the radio and said that I was a pal of his I would be thrilled, you know. I met him at a very young age, because it’s a small music community here, and I went to him to write some songs. And we did, and he’s just been a hero of all of ours, really. We toured together many times throughout the history of Great Big Sea early on and in the mid-1990s we did a tour all over the British Isles and Ireland with us and Ron and some other bands. I got to sort of spend a month on a bus with him, that was awesome,” he said.
“And I think it’s true that he was considered to be a true poet and an amazing artist, but also one that was flawed and had his issues for sure. There’s no shame in saying that the guy that spoke of the biggest demons on earth in his songs had some of them himself. There’s no shame in that I hope. I think the biggest reason why Ron was so important to the people from Newfoundland and Labrador is that we felt like we had someone who could tell our stories in our own language in such a beautiful and perfect, world-class way. And he wasn’t writing about getting in a pick-up truck and driving to Los Angeles. He didn’t write about a gun slinger from Texas; he didn’t write about the horse on the trail on the prairies. He wrote about us – the cab driver in town. He wrote about a fisherman and a girl who fell in love with him. He wrote about dreaming if being a starlet when you’re a child from a cold frozen island in the North Atlantic. He wrote about the triumphs and tragedies of this place.
“He kind of became like our Greek chorus. He sang the news and he was ours, you know? The biggest stars in my life when I was 10 years old weren’t from Chicago or London or Paris or New York – they were from here. And like Ron they didn’t play music from anywhere else – they played music from here. They played traditional music from here and they played it the way they wanted, in a very contemporary way and when they turned to write their own songs they wrote songs from here and they were amazing. And you know what, what’s wrong with writing a song about being in a pick-up truck in Petty Harbour?”
Doyle also said he is most likely going to record some traditional music that perhaps comes from a lost, or at least previously undiscovered or previously unrecorded of the vast Newfoundland canon.
“We did it with Great Big Sea, but I haven’t done it on one of my records yet but I think I will this time. I wouldn’t mind having a new traditional piece of music. And although it’s part of our being to want to do that, when you categorize how we go about it in a certain way it sounds like an act of librarianism or historical effort. In more cases than not it’s because the songs are just so f***ing awesome and it’s like ‘that’s an awesome song and it’s going to make our record and our concert better,’ And I love that it comes from that place,” he said.
“We’re not collecting those songs and replaying them because they’re like porridge and it’s good for us or something. They’re just wicked songs. And if you think about it, it’s the hardest thing for most bands to write enough good songs. If you just cover a bunch of other people’s stuff then it ends up not really being your own. Whereas in Newfoundland we have always had this treasure chest of awesomeness that has always been ours. Lukey’s Boat is just as much my song as it is anyone else’s from here. So in some ways they are the fallback for us.”
Besides the new book and album, Doyle said he is mulling over all sorts of different offers from film and television production companies, some of which he isn’t at liberty to talk about. What he can say is that at some point he will most likely be playing a small role in the new Newfoundland-based Netflix series called Frontier, which is being produced by his good pal and fellow Newfoundlander, Allan Hawco, the creator of the wildly popular Republic of Doyle series. Doyle played a semi-recurring character on that show, a shady operator named Wolf.
“They always need a few big hairy dudes in the woods kind of thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t yelling at someone in the woods onscreen at some point soon. It’s a spectacular show. I have seen the pilot although the show hasn’t aired yet. It’s stars Jason Momoa from Game of Thrones and he’s also Aquaman in the new movies. He’s a big, impressive looking fella and I met him a couple of times. The show is about the fur trade wars and the Hudson’s Bay Company in the 1750s or so. There’s a bunch of heavy hitters in it and Allan is one of the principals in it too. They filmed season one last year and start season two in November so I might end up doing something in that,” he said.
“There’s been a few really, really interesting tempting things coming in for me. There’s a lot of really cool offers and I wish I could tell you about half of them, but I can’t. It always comes down to scheduling so we’ll see. Concerts come first for me. I honestly don’t want to do any of that stuff in the place of being a musician.”
For more information on the Trenton Scottish Irish Festival and Doyle’s appearance, visit http://www.trentonscottishirish.com.
For information on Doyle and his forthcoming book and album, visit http://alandoyle.ca.
* Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com
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