Great Big Seachange: Alan Doyle branches out with first solo album

TORONTO – Alan Doyle remembers with uncommon clarity the first time he held a Great Big Sea album in his hands.

It was Aug. 2, 1993 and he was standing outside his rental house on Suez Street in St. John’s, N.L. The Doyle family of musicians was, in his words, “legendary” in his hometown of Petty Harbour, but they tended to perform at weddings, parties and dances. They didn’t have their own albums, and Doyle never thought it would happen to him either.

“I thought that only happened to people from the mainland,” Doyle recalled. “It was the coolest day of my life.”

Well, it’s roughly 19 years later and Great Big Sea has issued 11 albums since its blue-hued debut, so Doyle has rarely felt that same indescribable kick he had that day.

Until this week, that is, when Doyle’s solo debut, “Boy on Bridge,” hit stores. When asked how he felt finally seeing his given name splashed across a record cover, the personable Doyle slid his iPhone from his pocket and proudly showed off a photo taken the first time he held the album in his hands. In it, he wears a goofy grin as wide as the Rock itself.

“Look at that — I got my own record,” he marvels, sipping a coffee on a sunny Toronto patio. “I realize I should be above it. But I can’t help it.

“It thrills me to the bone, still.”

That was, in effect, the motivation behind Doyle’s decision to issue his first solo record — the music-industry vet doesn’t get the opportunity to do anything for the first time that often anymore.

“In many ways, this record is about firsts — it’s about doing stuff that I’ve never done before,” Doyle said.

“I really wanted to go live in other people’s music worlds. Let’s go do it someone else’s way for a change.”

And change was exactly what Doyle was after, recording the restlessly eclectic “Boy on Bridge” in a diverse range of locations.

He recorded at traditional locales, including the L.A. studio of Mike Post — the multiple Grammy and Emmy winner who composed the themes to “Law & Order,” “The Rockford Files,” “L.A. Law” and “Hill Street Blues” — and with Gordie Sampson in Nashville.

Doyle, who would seem to have as many connections as a discount intercontinental flight, also collaborated with actor Russell Crowe, Blue Rodeo frontman Jim Cuddy and Regina guitarist Colin James on the album.

But Doyle also wanted to experiment with “guerilla recording.” So he found time to record in a theatre dressing room in Long Beach, Calif., on a beach near Dayton, Fla., at various hotels across the continent, and even on a cruise ship, where Doyle recruited hundreds of his fellow seabound vacationers to add their voices to the mix.

The roving recording ethos seems especially fitting for an album of departures, on which Doyle strays far from the jaunty Celtic-and-folk-inflected pub singalongs he’s known for in his other band.

He explores straightahead rock (“I’ve Seen a Little” and “Light the Way”), country (“Where the Nightingale Sings” and “Break it Slow”) and piano ditties (“Love While Love’s Awake” and “The Rules Will All Be Broken,” which he envisioned as a “Tom Waits-y torch ballad”). The record closes with “Where I Belong,” an upbeat track that features only Doyle’s unique voice, unfettered by instrumental accompaniment.

The bridge in the album’s title sits in the middle of the “little fishing town” where Doyle grew up. He remembers countless days spent on that bridge, waiting for a schoolbus or thumbing a ride to St. John’s, “dreaming of what else there was.” It seemed a fitting reference for an album characterized by “wanderlust.”

“It’s kind of the opposite of nostalgia, I suppose,” mused Doyle. “A lot of that’s reflected in the songs. I guess you could call it some kind of undying curiosity about how other people do stuff…. I can’t help it.”

But the further Doyle strayed, the more he realized how bound he was to his style.

“I have no voice but my own, and I never have,” said Doyle, who turns 43 on Thursday. “There are times I wish I did — come and sing an opera song or something — (but) I can only really write what’s true to me. And that’s probably a good thing.”

It might come as a comfort to Great Big Sea fans that, in fact, some things don’t change.

Doyle said his solo excursion will have no impact on the future of the group, which will celebrate its 20th anniversary next year.

“We’re just supporting our own musical and artistic lives together,” he said. “We didn’t get in Great Big Sea to have the biggest song of the summer … we got into Great Big Sea to have a lifetime playing music, and that’s never changed. That’s never wavered.

“It’s what everyone wants to do, to be doing this when we’re 23, and doing this when we’re 63.”