Sound Advice: Alan Doyle and the Beautiful Gypsies

It’s not much of a stretch to claim that the current crop of sea-shanty Celtic/Folk Rock floor-stompers couldn’t have risen to the heights they’ve achieved without those boards first being softened by Great Big Sea. The Canadian band dispersed in 2013 after its 20th-anniversary tour and the subsequent departure of founding member Sean McCann, but co-lead vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Alan Doyle may have sensed the inevitable because he launched his solo career in 2012.

Doyle is almost impossibly diverse as an artist, serving as songwriter, performer and producer for Great Big Sea, as well as for himself and other artists, including his sister Michelle. Doyle is also an accomplished actor, having been featured in a number of films and television shows, from childhood roles (his 2012 solo album, Boy on Bridge, was titled after his film credit in his first movie, 1981’s A Whale for the Killing) to appearing as Allen A’Dayle in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood opposite Russell Crowe (Doyle co-wrote and produced songs on Crowe’s solo album, My Hand, My Heart, and the pair released an album together, The Crowe/Doyle Songbook Vol. III, in 2011). In 2014, Doyle published his first book, Where I Belong, a memoir about his childhood in Newfoundland and Labrador.

In his solo work, Doyle doesn’t chart a course too far from Great Big Sea’s compass headings. In fact, he still does a fair number of the band’s tunes in his live sets. His vocal timbre is somewhere in the neighborhood of Mike Ness and Huey Lewis (who Doyle sort of resembles in some photos), and his solo songs from Boy on Bridge and the recently released So Let’s Go are powerful Indie Rock evocations of the Celtic and Folk traditions that have formed the basis of his body of work since playing with his uncle’s band as a teenager.

Alan Doyle has issued your marching orders, in the form of the song “1, 2, 3, 4” from So Let’s Go: “Whiskey, whiskey, the singer’s getting sore/We raised the roof now we’re lowering the floor/The band is blistered but we got a little more/When I say ‘one two,’ you say, ‘three four.’ ”