'Oh, before I let you go...' Band parodies why it's hard to get a Maritimer off the phone

The Nova Scotia band The Town Heroes have created a video that pokes fun at Maritimers' seeming reluctance to end a phone call.

The two-minute video features two friends chatting on the phone.

"Yeah, well, you seem pretty busy, I'll leave ya to 'er, and we'll chat another time, okay?"
"Ok, take her easy, buddy."
"Ok, yep, yep, have a good one."
"Take her slow, eh."
"Ok, you take care now."
"Don't do anything Iwouldn't do."
"Oh, before I let you go, big slabs of baloney on sale up at the Co-Op."

And so it goes for nearly the entire length of the video,whichhas racked up nearly 100,000 views in the five days since it was posted to the group's Facebook page.

"Idon't know if it's people don't have much to do, and they don't want to get off the phone, but that's kind of the way every phone call seems to end," said Mike Ryan,a member of the Town Heroesand one of the creators of the video.

Ryan and fellow band member and co-creator of the video, Bruce Gillis, are both from Inverness County, Cape Breton.

Ryan said they never really noticed that's the way they end their calls, until others pointed it out to them.

"People often make fun of us about our own long goodbyes, so we just dramatized it a little bit and basically played ourselves as the characters, and played it up a little bit," he told CBC's Maritime Noon.

The video features one band member sitting at a table with a beer, while the other is wearing goggles and appears to be working in his basement.

"That's just what Maritimers are doing a lot of the times, having a beer or tinkering away, so we tried to capture the essence of that," said Ryan.

Creating comedic videosis nothing new for the pair.

Their parody of ice skating commentary drew more than 1 million views in threedays last year, before the International Olympic Committeehadthe video taken down for copyright infringement, said Ryan.

In the video, Ryan said he was reinventing the commentary for Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir's gold medal Olympic performance: "I did it like a Cape Bretoner who would be at a hockey game screaming their head off."

Ryan said fans frequently message them asking for more videos. It's become part of the band's identity, even though "it's very different from our musical identity because our music is not comedic in any way."

He said they've come up with a concept for the next video, which will feature a re-envisioning of the invention of the telephone.

"There's a guy who was late for a game of ball hockey and Alexander Graham Bell decided to do something about it."