On the first day of school at York University, I met the incredible Irene Sankoff. We were friends for years, and then started dating. She brought me to musicals and I brought her to acoustic rock concerts—including countless Great Big Sea shows. We’d stay up all night listening to songs or driving on long car trips down to New York City, singing to each other.

Years later we got married and then, when we found we never saw each other between all of our day jobs and night jobs, we started writing musicals together so we could hang out. Our second musical, Come from Away, was set in Newfoundland, and was inspired by the incredible true story of the locals’ kindness after 9/11—and by my love of Newfoundland music.

At first, Irene wasn’t sure that Come from Away should even be a musical, but when we travelled out to Newfoundland on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, we went to a kitchen party benefit concert in the hockey rink. A local band, the Navigators, started playing and everyone started dancing: the locals, us “come from aways,” the executives from Lufthansa in their three-piece suits. Even though we were there to commemorate a solemn day, the music and spirit of Newfoundland reminded us that we are all there together—and that you need to dance and sing to remember you’re alive. We both realized that music is how Newfoundlanders come together, how they get through their ridiculously long winters. They bring over instruments and start to play; they sing and tell stories to stay warm and come together as a community. From that moment on, there was no way that Come from Away wasn’t a musical.

Working on it, we dove deep into the songs of incredible Newfoundland bands like Shanneyganock, the Once, the Dardanelles, Figgy Duff, the Navigators, the Irish Descendants, Rawlins Cross, and many more. But I always came back to one of the first albums I fell in love with: Great Big Sea’s second album, Up, which came out just as we started university, right before we started dating. It’s the soundtrack for our friendship and falling in love.

Though there is a lot of loneliness, sea sickness, and heartache on the album, the second track, “Goin’ Up,” perfectly captures the kitchen party spirit of Newfoundland. Alan Doyle sings about jigs and reels, heel and toe, about music all around, and how there’s no place like this place “if we get it on the go.” It’s

the kind of song that makes you want to dance. That makes you want, as the chorus says, to “lock the world outside.” It’s the kind of the song that inspired our relationship and our show. It brought a lot of things together for me and I never get tired of it.

David Hein is a playwright, songwriter, and actor. He was born in Regina, trained in Toronto, and is now resident in New York, and he has written two musicals: My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding and the Broadway smash hit Come from Away, with his writing partner and wife, Irene Sankoff.