Week of May 7, 2009, Issue #707
MUSIC
Joel Plaskett: Three is a magic number
Joel Plaskett takes his triple-disc album on the road
Bryan Birtles / bryan@vueweekly.com
When Halifax singer-songwriter Joel Plaskett was thinking about where to go next with his music, he juggled a number of ideas around in his head, searching for the right one. His previous album, 2007's Ashtray Rock, recorded with his band the Emergency, was perhaps his most successful—critically acclaimed and shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize—and Plaskett needed somewhere to go from there. Plaskett started to pore through old dictaphone tapes for snippets of ideas that could be turned into songs, he started to re-learn and re-work songs he had played live but never recorded. And he began to look for a unifying theme.
Once he got down to it, Plaskett was torn between ideas: he had a collection of songs with three-word titles that would make for a good album and a nice private joke in the track listing; he had a bunch of other songs that were closer to bangers than solo numbers that might work as an Emergency record; and he wanted to make a record with his dad focusing on the kind of British folk music the elder Plaskett had introduced him to growing up. "Why not just make a triple album?" he joked to himself.
"It started as a joke in my mind, and as soon as I made the joke I was like, 'That's what I'm doing, fuck it,'" he laughs over the phone from a tour stop in Toronto. "So I started going through my dictaphone tapes and going, 'OK, this song is about leaving, this is about returning, OK these ones are about loneliness,' and I started shuffling things about and recording."
What emerged was Three, a concept album about the number three, as well as being a musician on the road and the emotional vistas that go along with it. Whereas the number three forms a structure to build songs around in a relatively cheeky way, it's the road and Plaskett's personal relationships that form the meat of his newest album.
"It is a road album in the sense that there's a lot of travelling on it, but it's fairly personal in a sense in that it has a lot to do with the nature of the relationship I have with what I do and also with my home life, with my wife Rebecca, and that what I do has to take me away from that. It's the nature of trying to make a living as a musician," he explains. "You have this relationship with your audience and it's super rewarding but then you come out of that vacuum that you're in and you get home and that kind of attention is gone and you're there with people who know you from your home life and you have to shift who you are. Not completely, but it's a different kind of dialogue."
Still, putting out a triple album is such a monumental risk at a time when attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. As micro-blogging and status updates change the way we communicate with each other, 27 songs on a single idea starts to seem like a bit much, but as Plaskett explains, people are taking the time to listen to it.
"I'm so thrilled by the critical response to the record. In general, people have taken the time to listen to it, and if they've written any criticism it's been because they listened to it and for the most part comments have been really really positive. My greatest concern is just that it would be dismissed because it was long and maybe more time than people might want to dedicate to listening to an album. I've found it really rewarding in that regard, but I am surprised," he says. "I felt like it was a bit of a risk, but I also felt that most of the people that come to my shows have embraced the fact that I'm changing it up on every record and as a result I tend to find that if I follow my instincts to do something a little different that I'm rewarded for that instead of abandoned." V
Thu, May 14 (7 pm)
Joel Plaskett
McDougall United Church, $20
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