By Alexandra Pecci
Correspondent

If you were to snoop through Séan McCann’s music collection, you’d find Bob Marley, the Clash, and Johnny Cash, alongside traditional music from Newfoundland, a place he and his Great Big Sea band mates call home.

“We’re from a really weird little place,” he said. “Newfoundland is an island off the coast of Canada, and it’s just a real melting pot of traditional music.”

Great Big Sea adds its own flavor — maybe you could call it rock salt — to the traditional sea shanties of Newfoundland, blending the music of England, Ireland and Scotland with electric guitars and a driving beat. They are songs that McCann says “have thrived and morphed and grown and lived in the folk music canon in a dynamic way.”

“Every generation seems to reinterpret them,” McCann says, and Great Big Sea’s versions reflect the sensibilities of guys who grew up in the ‘80s listening to Van Halen. “We try to write our folk songs with big anthemic choruses.”

They’re choruses that are meant to be sung along to, which is exactly what McCann expects fans to do when Great Big Sea plays at the Tupelo Music Hall in Londonderry and the Blue Ocean Music Hall in Salisbury, Mass., next week.

“If you haven’t been to a GBS show, you should bring your voices and start clapping now,” McCann says. In fact, the audience sings so enthusiastically, that “the band has become nonessential. We conduct.”

“It’s a really happy show,” he says. “I think the fans have more fun even than I do.”

While they’ve been on tour, Great Big Sea has been road-testing music from its new album, the yet-to-be-released “Safe Upon the Shore.” The record, due out in late June or early July, features all-new original music. Great Big Sea just finished it on April 19. McCann calls it a return to form, even though there’s no traditional music on it.

“We used our traditional learning to interpret a lot of the stuff, so it sounds like a traditional Newfoundland record. The tradition is strongly there, but the songs are original,” he says.

“When we do that kind of thing, we try to stand up to songs that are 200 years old.”

In addition to being a return to form, the new album is a return to Great Big Sea itself. The band took some time off while its lead singer, Alan Doyle, shot the film “Robin Hood,” which stars Russell Crow as the title character and will be released May 14.

While Doyle was off making “Robin Hood,” others in the band kept themselves busy: Bob Hallett wrote a book and McCann made the album

“Lullabies for Bloodshot Eyes,” a tribute to fatherhood and marriage that’s a real departure from the kind of music he plays with Great Big Sea. Whereas Great Big Sea is “out to rock people,” “Lullabies for Bloodshot Eyes” is intimate and conversational, McCann says.

“It started with me writing lullabies for my two boys, Keegan and Finn,” he said, adding that having children changed his life in ways he didn’t expect.

“There’s a lot more to life than your life,” he says. “It just changed the way I looked at life in general and it made me a happier person as a result.”

McCann says branching out and trying new things is good for the band, which is in its 17th year playing together. Like in a marriage, adding things that are new and different keeps the relationship interesting.

“That’s good,” he says. “That’ll keep us together longer, I think, in the long run.”

If you go:
What: Great Big Sea
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, Londonderry (SOLD OUT); Blue Ocean Music Hall, Salisbury, Mass.
When: Tupelo Music Hall, Thursday, May 6 at 8 p.m.; Blue Ocean Music Hall, Wednesday, May 5 at 8 p.m.
Cost: $45 (Blue Ocean Music Hall)
Learn more: www.blueoceanhall.com