The Best Buoys: Afloat Again

I’ll repeat, one of the greatest things I’ve ever read about this (or any) band is a reddit comment someone sent me:

“I don’t really listen to The Dreadnoughts or The Longest Johns… They're fine singers but they sound like modern guys who work at Best Buy.”

As I’ve repeatedly said: this is true. We and TLJ will be absolutely upfront about the fact that we are nerds cosplaying shanty singers. Yeah, we can get the job done, and TLJ are particularly good at injecting new life into old songs, but I mean come on… Coffin, Rogers, Collins, Stan Hugill… these are shanty singers. We are shanty fans. And so I think we should all start a megaband called the Best Buoys. Noone else seems to like this idea. They are all idiots.

So, when I heard that TLJ were swinging through New York I messaged Robbie and begged, pleaded with him to let us do a quick acoustic thing beforehand. I’m not sure their management liked the idea and it took a while to confirm, but eventually the band did us the solid and reserved us the opening spot.

Photos: Cat McCormick

And we decided to buck almost 15 years of Dreadnoughts’ tradition by actually practicing the tunes, repeatedly, before going to play them. We would just have acoustic guitar, fiddle and accordion, no wall of noise to hide behind, the sound would have to be perfect. Or as close to perfect as we could manage, which is to say, not very close at all.

Here was the setlist:

Seaman’s Hymn (E)
Brisbane Harbour (Dm)
Roll Northumbria (Bm)
Joli Rouge (Cm)
Barrett’s Privateers (C)
Dear Old Stan (F)
Luang Prabang (Bm)|
Bay of Suvla (E)

I thought we’d just head out on stage to a few early attendees, do our thing to scattered applause, and step aside to let the real professionals (TLJ and the wonderful Seán Dagher) do their thing.

And then we walked on stage, and the crowd went bananas.

Right away I said: “We are the Dreadnoughts, and we are from New York City,” and people went WILD. I felt proud to call the city my home and these folks my fellow citizens. It’s a wild, crazy place, but it’s home, and to hear the crazy roaring response, for real, I got goosebumps.

Photos: Cat McCormick

I didn’t realize many would know who we were or what was going on, but I learned afterwards that many were stoked to see what they called “The Sea shanty party of the Millennium”. I guess the three acts together are an OK combo. The Best of all Buoys.

The full acoustic show was a huge success and we’d love to do it again (just don’t really know how). And the best part is that we had a recording of the show sent to us by the venue, which I’m busily mixing and mastering down to something like a listenable form. I’ll be releasing a few tracks on here for paid subscribers, including “Roll Northumbria” under the paywall below.

Anyway, this was an amazing experience and we thank the lovely lads in TLJ, and Sean too, for having us on board. We’re all going to ride the popularity of nautical music for as long as we can, and once it’s settled back into obscurity, we will all go back to selling mouse pads and video game consoles, forever comforted by the fact that one, for a brief shining moment in the history of the world, we were stars.

Dinnnng. Donnnng.