In addition to his new album A Week at the Warehouse, Alan Doyle recently released a new book, A Newfoundlander in Canada. The book is a hilarious, heartwarming account of leaving Newfoundland and discovering Canada for the first time.
Armed with the same personable, candid style found in his first book, Alan Doyle turns his perspective outward from Petty Harbour toward mainland Canada, reflecting on what it was like to venture away from the comforts of home and the familiarity of the island.
TC: Telling the stories of a young Newfoundlander discovering the rest of Canada for the first time, why was that such an important narrative for you to share?
AD: I’m not necessarily sure it’s super important…I thought it would be interesting for people to hear what Canada looked like to a fella’ from a fishing town on the very, very very, very, very, very, edge (laughs) of the country as he discovered Canada for the first time out the window of a band van. That’s a pretty unique glance and a weird lense to see anything through, right? And that’s when I started writing the book…(I realized) what I thought Canada was or whatever my exposure to it would be very, very unique from anybody else’s in Canada…so, that’s kind of how the whole thing started.
Often in a van, sometimes in a bus, occasionally in a car with broken wipers “using Bob’s belt and a rope found by Paddy’s Pond” to pull them back and forth, Alan Doyle and his bandmates from Great Big Sea charted new territory, and he constantly measured what he saw of the vast country against what his forefathers once called the Daemon Canada. In a period punctuated by triumphant leaps forward for the band, deflating steps backward and everything in between—opening for Barney the Dinosaur at an outdoor music festival, being propositioned at a gas station mail-order bride service in Alberta, drinking moonshine with an elderly church-goer on a Sunday morning in PEI—Alan’s few established notions about Canada were often debunked and his own identity as a Newfoundlander was constantly challenged.
Heartfelt, funny and always insightful, Alan Doyle’s stories tap into the complexities of community and Canadianness, forming the portrait of a young man from a tiny fishing village trying to define and hold on to his sense of home while navigating a vast and diverse and wonder-filled country.
TC: A million memories must have flooded back when you were writing the book and you wrote about roughly one memory per province, how did you ultimately choose those stories?
AD: I guess in some cases I picked the story that (first came) to my mind… I wondered what it would be like if I just wrote (what came to mind) when I think of New Brunswick. For example, what’s the first thing that comes to my mind…what’s the dominant memory I have of my earliest trips, of my first trips to New Brunswick. Hence I wrote the story and the chapter opens with us peeing up hill at Magnetic Hill. You know, try to find an image that’s more (memorable) than that one. Than you know, a bunch of fools peeing uphill…
So much of life on the road (was) made bearable because you do foolish things that are super fun and crazy when you’re in your early twenties… And so in some cases I picked the (story) that jumped to mind the quickest. In other cases I picked one that I thought sort of showed the arc of (Great Big Sea)… our journey across the country was somewhat mirrored by our success… So yeah, in certain cases I picked ones that were sort of plot driven, as opposed to other ones which were just funny or ridiculous, or just too ridiculous not to tell kind of thing.
TC: How do you want readers to feel when they read A Newfoundlander in Canada?
AD: Ideally it’s interesting to them and funny at times…I would love for people to understand how much I loved Canada the more I got to know it… Perhaps they learn that the joy sometimes is in the discovery and that’s what the whole trip was for me, it was just discovering what a great place Canada is and how cool it was to learn about it, especially the lucky way I got to learn about it which was playing concerts.
TC: As you mentioned in your book, you loved singing ballads. After listening to “Somewhere In A Song”, it seems that still remains true as it’s beautifully sung. It’s also an incredibly well written song, what inspired you to write “Somewhere In A Song?”
AD: It’s really inspired by my mom and dad. In particular, a story that comes from my first book about a particular thing that went on in my house called “Out of Oil Parties”. We had an oil furnace that heated our little house at Petty Harbour…My mom and dad didn’t have a lot of money…so regularly in the winter we ran out of heating oil.
I think that would be an embarrassing tragedy for most families but as I say in the book, we ran out of heating oil which of course was cause for great celebration…That’s when we put up blankets in the kitchen and we had that warm stove in the kitchen and we’d sing songs. That’s when my uncles would find out that Tom and Jean had no heating oil so there would be a great party…They’d all come over and next thing we’d be playing cards, and then guitars would come out and that’s where I learned that if I sang a few extra songs, I could stay up a bit (later)… In retrospect, it was such a wonderful example of somebody making something out of nothing, you know, and turning a bad night into a great night.
TC: If you could describe A Week at the Warehouse in 3 words or less, how would describe it?
AD: Live. Yup that’s it. Cause that’s exactly what it is… A bunch of people stood in a room with good microphones playing songs from beginning to end. Then we move on to the next one.
TC: What song(s) are you most proud of on A Week at the Warehouse?
AD: I’m quite proud of (“Somewhere In A Song”). I’m quite proud of that song just because I wanted to pay respect to my mom and dad for doing such a fantastic job with very little…so I’m quite proud of that one.
I’m quite proud of another song on there called “Beautiful To Me”, you know it’s really my sort of deceleration, you know, to anybody who’s been marginalized because of the way they look or because of their sexual preference or their gender identification…It’s my love letter to those people, (saying) that you can be anybody you want to be at my concert. Everybody is welcome at my concert as long as you want to be there… (If you’ve) got love in your heart, you’re welcome here. I just felt so bad that we still seem to be marginalizing those people and I wanted them to know that my concert is not a place where that will happen.
Alan Doyle is no stranger to the Canadian country music scene. He’s performed on multiple Dean Brody songs including “Soggy Bottom Summer” and “It’s Friday”. On Aug 24, Alan Doyle was one of Brody’s special guests in Toronto at Budweiser Stage.
