Artist · chart history · #583 in indie & aaa artist polls
Great Big Sea
Band St. John's Canada Active 1993–2013
Great Big Sea formed in 1993 in St. John's, Canada and was active until 2013. Great Big Sea has 4 chart appearances on 4 radio countdowns from 3 stations on RockLists, spanning 2002–2006. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Sea Of No Cares”, which appears on 1 list with a best position of #56. The station that charted Great Big Sea most often is WBER (Rochester, NY), with 2 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 2002.
Great Big Sea took the old songs of Newfoundland and plugged them in. Formed in St. John's in 1993 by Alan Doyle, Séan McCann, Bob Hallett and Darrell Power, they tore into traditional folk tunes and sea shanties with rock-band muscle, digging into the island's centuries of Irish, Scottish and Cornish heritage and turning it into big, stomping singalongs.
At home it worked on a massive scale: eleven of their albums went gold in Canada, four of those platinum, and between 1996 and 2016 they ranked as the sixteenth best-selling Canadian artist in their own country. Power left in 2003 and Murray Foster came in, and in 2004 the band delivered Something Beautiful*, with "When I Am King" carrying their rowdy Celtic rock onto the countdowns.
The band wound things up in 2013. Doyle and McCann have kept going as solo acts, and the Great Big Sea songs still turn up in their sets.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Great Big Sea on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sea Of No Cares | 1 | #56 | – | 2002 | |
| 2 | When I Am King | 2 | #96 | – | 2004 |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
Year-end chart timeline
Combined year-end countdown points per year. Taller bars mean more songs placing higher across more stations.
Every countdown appearance
| Year | # | Song | Countdown |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2006 | 586 | Artist ranking | WXPN 885 All-Time Greatest Artists (2006) |
| 2004 | 98 | When I Am King | The Bear Top 107 Songs of 2004 |
| 2004 | 96 (tie) | When I Am King | WBER Listener Countdown 2004 |
| 2002 | 56 (tie) | Sea Of No Cares | WBER Listener Countdown 2002 |
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