Sometimes it takes an outsider to help someone (or a group) see that there’s a better way to do something.

To prepare the follow-up to their self-produced album The Hard and the Easy, the members of Great Big Sea — Alan Doyle, Bob Hallett and Sean McCann — brought in noted singer/songwriter Hawksley Workman to produce the project.

According to McCann, the first thing that Workman did upon taking the job as producer was “to tell us to forget the 30-odd songs we already had record, and instead we should write a new record from scratch. It was a huge ego blow to us, and we were all very upset and angry, but we stuck with our initial decision to go with Hawksley, trusted our instincts and wrote eight new songs that are on the record.”

Fortune’s Favour blends the band’s Celtic sound and top-notch harmonies with Workman’s penchant for turning things up a notch, and the end result is an album that is definitely worth a listen.

Alongside folksy tunes like “England,” “The Banks of Newfoundland” and “The Rocks of Marasheen” are pop/rock-flavored cuts like “Walk On the Moon” and “Straight to Hell.”

“[Workman] pushed us in a direction that we would never have gone in on our own,” McCann says. “That’s the first time that a producer was able to actually get us to do what he wanted us to do and have a good result.

“And he’s such a force of nature. He did things so differently and we learned things about ourselves that we didn’t know. For example, it turns out that Bob Hallett can sing higher than me. I always thought I was the Bee Gee of the group, but on this album, I’m not.”

McCann adds that “after 15 years, you’d think we would have figured that out. It takes someone to strip you down and remove your preconceptions. It takes a good producer to point out what’s really going on and make us really listen to each other again.”