It's spring: Flowers are blooming, birds are singing, and I have dutifully fallen in love.

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With a band. Why fall in love with one man when you can fall in love with five?

This is why, in all my years at newspapers, I have never been sent to review a concert. I am far too emotional about live music. If a band is any good live, I am filled with admiration. If they seem to be enjoying themselves and throw a little charm at the audience, I am filled with affection. And if they happen to be cute, too, I am filled with the desire to stow away on their tour bus.

There goes journalistic objectivity.

So I didn't attend the Great Big Sea concert last Thursday night in an official professional capacity, and a good thing too, because I was hopelessly smitten.

What's not to love about appealing Canadians who perform rousing drinking songs, sing-along sea chanteys and sweet ballads? Great Big Sea's music is often categorized, even by the band, as "folk," but I think that's misleading. "Celtic rock" would be more accurate, or maybe "Irish wedding reception."

"Folk" makes them sound as if they sit on stools and croon "I Gave My Love A Cherry."

And everyone who saw "Animal House" knows what the punishment for that is.

Nobody physically able to stand sits when Great Big Sea plays. You are forced out of your seat at the point of a fiddle bow and kept inflated by squeezebox. Even if you don't know the song -- and the band's legions of fans know all the songs -- you quickly pick up the chorus. It's a big sing-along party that leaves you with a strange yearning to go to sea.

The whiff of salt air comes all the way from Newfoundland, like most of the band. Being good Canadians, they promised to keep us updated on hockey scores throughout the show Thursday night, during the Pens' ill-fated final game against Ottawa. This put them in an awkward position as the evening unraveled.

Dodging a potential international incident, frontman Alan Doyle broke the bad news gently. He and singer Sean McCann assured the disappointed crowd that, like most from outlying provinces, "We think Ottawa is overrated anyway."

Hey, most Americans don't even know it's the capital. Ottawhere?

The hundreds who filled the Rex on the South Side that night actually benefited from the general American cluelessness about things Canuck: In Canada, Great Big Sea fills huge venues with thousands of screaming fans. Here, virtually unknown and disguised as humble folkies, they play much smaller houses where the newly enamored and short -- and here I am thinking, as usual, of myself -- can easily swim down the crowded aisle right to the foot of the stage.

Each band member plays several instruments, which always impresses me. I took lessons on piano and guitar, but the only thing that really took was, oddly, the recorder. I play a mean recorder. Extremely mean, according to the majority of people who rank a soprano recorder right up there with thumbscrews as an instrument of torture.

Not only do they play, with verve and energy and obvious enjoyment, but they all sing as well, periodically lining up for multipart harmonies that can only be described as shirtless.

I've loved that sound since college, where I sang in women's a capella groups and listened, rapt, to men's a capella groups. Back in those days, I kept my eyes closed much of the time (which explains my grades) because the luscious chords were issuing from the throats of scrawny youths ravaged by '80s hairstyles. Not a problem with Great Big Sea.

So to review: They're musical all-rounders who sing, play and compose; they ooze good-natured charm, and they're fun to watch. I could have resisted all of that. Maybe. If not for the other thing.

My finely honed sensitivities detected, under all that stalwart musicality, something else. A certain literate quality. Listening to a song Thursday night, I heard the lyric "struts and frets" and was startled to recognize Shakespeare. I did some research on the band's Web site.

They have English degrees. Their brains are littered with pages of Chaucer and Austen and Melville and still, somehow, they function.

A tip from a groupie after the show led me to bassist Murray Foster, fetching food for the band at Tom's Diner.

We had a brief discussion of, I kid you not, Canadian-American relations. He was gracious enough not to bring up softwood lumber.

OK, maybe that doesn't make your heart skip a beat, but I'm a journalist. With an English degree.

Let me count the ways.