Joel Plaskett (And His Dad) Take It Up A Notch
By: Todd Snelgrove
June 29, 2009 – Halifax, Canada
Sitting in a rental car in Toronto, en route to Winnipeg to start yet another cross-Canada tour, and armed with a brand new triple album, Joel Plaskett continues to ascend the ranks of indie stardom, a journey he began many years ago in Halifax with his band Thrush Hermit. After several years of touring under his own name, as well as assuming production duties for a number of East Coast-based artists, Plaskett is slowly becoming a household name here in his native land. At least in households where albums by groups like Two Hours Traffic, Arcade Fire and The Jimmy Swift Band receive airtime. Nowadays if you type "Joel" into Google you'll probably find Plaskett in the top handful of search returns – certainly an indicator of some level of notoriety, but is it fame?
"I don't really feel famous. I certainly feel like things are rolling and I'm getting attention, which I'm really thrilled about," says Plaskett. "Frankly I don't really have any desire to be famous so I kind of hope not."
Non-aspirations aside, something else that thrills Plaskett is reaching the level where he can confidently tour the country in soft-seat venues. After a successful run of shows in Toronto, he's set his sights on one of Canada's most famous concert halls. "We pretty much sold the Horseshoe out six nights in a row – that's upwards of 2500 to 3000 people. The capacity of Massey is 2,500, so we thought, well, let's try it."
Securing a date at the prestigious Massey Hall gave Plaskett the confidence to make the leap to theatres for the whole tour. "It's a bit of a risk but it's an exciting one," he says. "I've done theatres here and there but in terms of a national touring schedule this is the biggest one I've ever embarked on."
The tour in support of his new release, Three, is a fitting time for Plaskett to make the leap to quieter, more attentive venues. As a triple album, Three covers a lot of ground. With 27 tracks in total, each nine-song disc manages to clock in around 35 minutes. "There's still some brevity in something so longwinded," opines Plaskett. "I just felt like it would be cool to make a record that gave me a lot of material to tour with for all different kinds of shows, whether they're rock 'n' roll shows or acoustic shows."
And this tour will be just that. Three prominently features Plaskett's father Bill on acoustic guitar and Rose Cousins and Ana Egge on backup vocals, so he decided to bring them on the road. "The four of us are out doing a tour, so it's not really a rock 'n' roll show so to speak . . . but at the same time, at the end of the night if somebody's got a request, I don't mind getting a little goofy with an acoustic guitar and singing a song even if it's not exactly a definitive version. And the Emergency [his usual backing band] will be joining us for those last couple of dates so it'll be an acoustic/electric show to pump it up.... It's definitely uncharted terrain for me."
While Gordie Johnson (Grady, Big Sugar) produced Ashtray Rock, the most recent Joel Plaskett Emergency record, Plaskett opted to take the production chair alone for the first time for this project. "The amount of the material first of all, it was not something I wanted to have a lot of dialogue about how it was going to get done. I had a vision for it and I also saw it as an opportunity to learn more about the studio that I had just set up," Plaskett explains.
"I set up a studio space and did all the engineering. I bought an old 2'' tape machine. I did it all on analog tape on 16-track. I really like the limitations of that, as well as the vibe of it – it's very tangible. You just spool up the tape and if you don't get it on that take then you erase it and you do it again.... It's not to say I didn't call on a lot of people's advice. Gordie was instrumental in talking through some of the ideas with me and my dad was very much a part of it, so there was still a lot of collaboration."
As usual, Plaskett's new recording is available in LP format. Why does he insist on adhering to a virtually bygone medium?
"A couple of reasons. I love it as a format, and I prefer it, I prefer the sound of it," he begins. "I love the sound of the audio; I think it's better. I think that it responds, they age better than CDs. The artwork is always a big part of it. You have a static image as opposed to a MySpace page where you can flip around the internet and listen to MP3s and read about them at the same time. With vinyl all you're presented with is all the artist gave you, whether it's a gatefold or a picture with an insert with the words or whatever. But it's this static thing you can sit with.
"You can party better with vinyl too," he continues. "I had some friends over and we were listening to ZZ Top's Tres Hombres, standing around looking at the vinyl while we listened to it rock the track, because everybody can look at a record because it's big enough. We've got a gramophone at home that plays 78s that we wind up. And that gramophone doesn't require electricity! How fucking cool is that? If the world were to come to a grinding technological halt tomorrow and our grid was taken down and our hard drives were useless and our CDs were useless, I can still wind up my gramophone, and put on a 78 and listen to music.
"The other thing is, I really feel that vinyl holds so much more mystery. The way it ages, the way it looks, the amount of information you're given, the beauty of the whole thing – it retains this mystery that the digital world seems to have sucked out of everything. To me there are records I still find really mysterious. The stuff I discovered as a teenager, whether it was Zeppelin or whatever, as ridiculous as some of that artwork was, it was, here's the image we want you to associate with ‘Stairway to Heaven'. And I'm like, wow, and it works, right?"
Of course he's right, he's Joel Plaskett.
Video: "Through And Through And Through" by Joel Plaskett
