(Bill Plaskett joins his son Joel on the younger Plaskett’s new album as well as his current tour. Photo by Ingram Barrs.)
“If you walk, you rust,” Joel Plaskett said, quoting a line from one of his own tunes.
It was an appropriate choice of words if there ever was one.
Plaskett graciously took some time to chat with East Coast Noise a few days ago, but he was in the middle of leaving a radio station interview to head back to Fredericton’s Playhouse theatre to do soundcheck for that night’s concert.
ECN caught him just prior, during and at the end of a cab ride, not to mention between other interviews.
Plaskett quoted the line from the tune “Run, Run, Run” off his new album Three (Maplemusic) when asked if he was always as busy as he was that afternoon.
He says it’s good to keep moving and keep changing things. Otherwise, you might just rust.
Plaskett, singer-songwriter and leader of the Joel Plaskett Emergency as well as his own solo project, just wrapped the first few east coast dates on his tour in support of Three, a triple-disc record.
It’s a huge project that has garnered him some of the best reviews of his career.
It started when Plaskett noticed that he had a handful of songs coming together where each title was one word repeated three times.
Always one to grab hold of a theme or concept and run with it, Plaskett turned that little theme into the most expansive and time-consuming album of his career. While it’s a solo record, he invited several guests to perform on the record, including singer-songwriters Rose Cousins, Ana Egge and Plaskett’s father Bill Plaskett.
Each disc is its own separate record – the first one deals with departure, the second with separation and the third with reuniting. Each disc is linked together, which Plaskett says was a challenge to accomplish.
“It was a different record to finish, to sort of see through to completion because there was just so much material,” he says. “I found that recording and composing the songs was not a big deal, you know, it was just getting it all mixed and mastered and getting the artwork done and you know, to really see it through. I wanted it to be like a special package to look good and sound good and be complete.
“It took me a long time because I had to focus essentially on three records to decide how they would be connected and how many songs I would use.”
There are 27 songs on Three, but Plaskett recorded three more which didn’t make the cut (they’re now available as a 7” single from his record label New Scotland Records). He says it was a challenge to make three records and connect them all without losing the overall focus of the project.
“Sometimes I’d have the moments where I was like, ‘Is this any good?’ I’d been focusing on it too hard like looking through a pinhole, you know what I mean? And because so much of it was done by myself in the studio, yeah, I needed some perspective.”
To help him sort it all out, Plaskett took the album to his good buddy Gordie Johnson (Grady, Big Sugar) in Texas to mix the album and give him some fresh perspective.
Johnson, a friend to many east coast bands, was happy to help out, Plaskett says, explaining that Johnson has a way of helping an artist find exactly what it is they’re looking for.
In the day and age of hit singles and artists of the month where albums are becoming more and more like dinosaurs, Plaskett admits he was a little concerned how people would react to a three-disc album.
“I was concerned certainly about how people would react to a triple album because it could be dismissed or just considered pretentious or something. But I also thought it’s hard to get noticed these days, you’ve got to do something dramatic, you know? So that’s what I aimed to do, just to make something that felt really good to me and took me places I’d never been as a writer.
“And I love thinking conceptually, and something this elaborate was frankly kind of fun and exciting and I thought well, if it’s exciting for me then hopefully my audience is going to go, ‘Oh cool’ as opposed to ‘Eh whatever, it’s a really long record. Who cares?’”
Plaskett says he gets a kick out of flying in the face of what’s considered normal these days, but ultimately he just cares about records and he enjoys telling a story over the course of a long recording.
On the road with the singer-songwriter this time out is Cousins, Egge and Bill Plaskett.
“It’s got lots of variety even though it’s an acoustic show, and that’s what I’m really enjoying,” Plaskett explains. “It’s a nice balance between still making it feel a little spontaneous and rock n’ roll even though we’re standing there with acoustic guitars. ”
The Emergency, Dave Marsh and Chris Pennell, will join Plaskett and company for a few select dates on the tour, notably two gigs in Halifax that are coming up at the end of May.
Three is in stores on CD now, and it’s available online here. The album will be released on vinyl via Plaskett’s own New Scotland Records shortly, with pre-orders being shipped this Friday. For more, check this out.
Joel Plaskett, along with Rose Cousins, Ana Egge, Bill Plaskett and The Joel Plaskett Emergency, will perform in Halifax at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium on Thursday, May 28 and Saturday, May 30. The second show is already sold out, so if you’re interested, you’d best pick up your tickets soon. Plaskett’s only other east coast date coming up soon is Tuesday, June 30 at Market Square in Saint John, N.B.
