Call for Singers

If at first you do succeed...

One of the most rewarding experiences that came out of the Into the North sessions was putting “Fire Marengo” together. This was in 2018, before anyone had thought of Sea Shanty collaboration vids on Tiktok. I just randomly decided to ask our facebook fans if they wanted to record some vocals at home for an upcoming song. All they had to do was record themselves singing and hit “Send”.

The response was overwhelming; we had something like 120 submissions in the first week. The people we eventually selected did a great job, and here was the result:

So we’ve just decided to do all of this again for an as-yet-unannounced album we are planning. (wait, did we just announce it? I don’t fucking know.) We sent out the call, and something like 70 submissions have come in so far. And two things really stand out this time.

First, the quality of the submissions is way up. No offense to the original submissions, but good gravy some of these newer folks can sing, many much better than we can.

Second, the gender balance of the submissions has totally flipped. In the first group, easily 90% of the singers were men, but as of now 65% of the second batch of singers are women. With this samples size that can’t be a coincidence, and in a genre that has been (understandably) totally male-dominated since forever, this is a very good sign. Obviously the male-domination makes sense; the original singers were literally out on the boats, and sailing was a deeply gendered profession at the time. Also, the genre does have a distinctive traditional sound that you only get with predominantly male voices.

But the continued emergence of the female sea shanty singer is a truly excellent thing, because the genre needs new life and new sounds, and because some groups are absolutely knocking it out of the park. I want to use this post to signal-boost female-led or female-only sea shanty groups in order to get something of a list together. Our two favorite groups in this style are The Johnson Girls and the Silver Darlings, and I know there are lots, lots more. Comments are open, so crowd: source!

And if you want a chance to sing a sea shanty on the next album, email us at thedreadnoughts@gmail.com and attach a recording of yourself singing. What’s the worst that can happen? It’s not like we are going to publicly post a montage of all the bad submissions which we will endlessly mock and laugh at forever. We would obviously never do that.