A Field By The Sea. It’s a pretty stirring title, invoking, as it does, visions of desolate beaches, wind-swept heather and frothy, undulating waves. Smokin’ Joe Wiseman came up with it while looking seawards from Cape St. George, where his eyes came across the cemetery – a field by the sea if ever there was one. While not exactly a somber outing, Field does spend some time exploring death. The title track looks into outmigration, lamenting the loss of Newfoundland and Labrador’s young and wondering who will lie with the province’s ancestors in their “marble orchards,” which is another poetic handle for graveyards. “The image of the graveyard with the limited number of headstones and people leaving town with the mill closing, it all came together,” Wiseman says. And then there’s the “Ballad of the Blue Puttees,” a melancholy ode to the Newfoundland Regiment and it’s royal ascension in World War I. That ascension came at great cost, as Mr. Wiseman notes during a haunted, spoken bridge of the song: “Only 68 answered roll call on the morning of that fight.”