Newfoundland, now officially known as the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, was the first bit of North American soil encountered by European explorers. Ever since, the rest of the continent has left the rocky island in the far North Atlantic, and its hardy natives who mostly eke out a living from the ocean (fishing, whaling, oil, etc.), pretty much alone.

Since it was largely settled by people from the British Isles and Northern Europe, and the island is so isolated, traditional Celtic music took root hard and fast and, even as modernity encroached, has never gone away. Today it lives on in Newfoundland's most successful musical export, Great Big Sea, who combine Celtic tradition and sea chanteys with driving, spiritual rock - think a slightly more earnest version of the Waterboys and you're almost there.

Great Big Sea, which formed in the early '90s, may not be well-known this far south, but the band has sold more than a million albums in Canada and has been nominated for several Juno awards, that country's equivalent to a Grammy. Aiming to broaden their horizons (and ours), Great Big Sea plays House of Blues Sunday evening, and Rocks Off spoke with accordion player, fiddler and mandolinist Bob Hallett from far-off St. John's earlier this week.

RO: I think you may be the first person from Newfoundland I've ever actually talked to.

Bob Hallett: That would not surprise me. There aren't a lot of us. And those of us who exist, not many of us go into entertainment. Of if they are, not the sort you pay for.

RO: I was reading up on Newfoundland and it seems pretty remote. Is there a part of the U.S. it's similar to at all?

BH: Geographically and climactically, probably no, but in terms of isolation and being a place where characters come from, for lack of a better world, perhaps Alaska. I mean, Newfoundland is probably more attractive to Canadians than Alaska. It's the sort of place people want to go because it's so remote and doesn't really feel like anywhere else.

RO: What do you think it is about the sea that inspires so many musicians to write songs about it?

BH: For us, growing up here in Newfoundland, the sea is not benign the way it is in Florida or somewhere like that in the Southern U.S. where you'd swim in it or sail in a boat or search for seashells on the shore. The sea here is very cold and almost violent in terms of being stormy, with waves and cliffs and crashing rocks and that sort of thing. The ocean is where people work.

In fishing villages and small towns along the coast like what I grew up in, the houses don't even face the water. They face inland, because the sea is something fearsome. So for us, it's kind of a love/hate relationship. We'd never write a song like "Margaritaville," you know. The ocean for us is a bit terrifying.

RO: A lot of the band's music is based on sea chanteys. What are a few of the better-known ones, or what are a few of your favorites?

BH: Some we perform almost every night. One is a song called "Excursion Around the Bay," which is a singalong song about an excursion, like a day trip that goes awry (chuckles). Another one that we do frequently is a song called "Donkey Riding," which is what they call a captain's chantey. In other words, some sea chanteys were sung just for entertainment, but captain's chanteys are a way of coordinating sailors and their work. So even though the job that the song was invented to coordinate is gone, the song remains, which never ceases to interest me.

Chanteys have this sort of amazing singalong quality, and one of the reasons they draw people in is they were designed to be sung by a large group of people, and they had very sort of repetitive and engaging melodies because they were a way of coordinating work as much as anything else. When you need 100 men to pull something in a very specific way at a very specific time, a song is a better way of doing it than saying "All right, when I count to four, everybody do this, and when I count another four everybody do that." The jobs those songs required are long gone, but people enjoyed the music so much that the songs remained.