Joel Plaskett loves his life as a famous musician, but he’s planning to never show up in the tabloids. The veteran Halifax rocker believes that massive celebrity would be a nightmare for him.
“Fame for fame’s sake feels like a curse,” he says. “It’s of no interest to me—it seems like misery. I love meeting my fans, but I really have no interest in having people who don’t know my music [recognize me].”
As he takes time out from setting up for a recent show in Moncton, New Brunswick, Plaskett seems far too earnest and genuine to become the kind of star who demands the spotlight. But while he’s certainly no diva, Plaskett ought to get used to fame. In an industry that spits out old stars as fast as it can embrace new ones, his career continues to grow with each critically acclaimed record he completes. He seems to play bigger venues every time he comes to Toronto, and his May 23 show at the legendary Massey Hall is a new high.
“There’s something about a theatre. If I’m aspiring to [reach a certain] place, to have a collective energy speaking to 3,000 people, that’s the best,” says Plaskett, his excitement palpable. He’s pulling out all the stops for his upcoming show by bringing along a large cast of family and friends, including backup singers Rose Cousins and Ana Egge, his guitarist father Bill Plaskett, and familiar backing band and old friends The Emergency.
“The Emergency are going to come up and join us, so it’s going to be an acoustic show followed by an electric one. We’ll build it up and get to some of the songs on the record. I’m excited about it—I’m nervous, but I’m getting really geared up.”
Plaskett’s new album, Three, is an ambitious triple-disc set that finds his songwriting skills in top form. The sprawling, 27-track collection features material ranging from old time rock and roll to wistful Maritime ballads and slow-burning anthems. Three is also a solo album in the truest sense of the word: Plaskett not only wrote the album alone, but also produced it, engineered it, and played all the instruments himself.
“This was a hell of a lot of work,” Plaskett deadpans. “It was fun to do, but it took a lot of focus for an extended period of time.”
As he started writing, Plaskett began to notice phrases appearing in threes, and thus picked up the emerging theme for the whole project:
“I started thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll make a record with every song in threes…but there are all these other songs too…and I want to make a record with my dad too.’ So I had three albums in my mind, and I thought, ‘Oh, maybe it will be a triple album!’”
The three discs follow the trials of a touring musician as Plaskett sings about departure, loneliness on the road, and the slow return home. It’s an extension of the lyrical territory he began to mine on his 2005 solo album La De Da, and he’s conscious of picking up on familiar themes.
“People who follow my back catalogue will hear phrases they’ve heard before. I recycle language a lot—there are phrases you rest on when you speak. As a writer, I sometimes slip back into describing things a certain way. And I’ve always really liked that in [the work of] Springsteen or Chuck Berry. It becomes an iconic part of their catalogue, like the way Springsteen writes about Jersey.”
The comparison is significant: just as Bruce Springsteen has long been regarded as the poet of the Jersey shore, Plaskett has built a reputation for himself as the voice of the Maritimes, the local rock star who didn’t abandon home for greener pastures. As he continues to take on challenging projects, Plaskett is cementing himself as one of Canada’s most prolific artists. But does he ever think about his legacy?
“Not really,” he says. “I work with my head down most of the time, and I’m always surprised when people want to talk to me about it. The only thing I think about in terms of a legacy is creating a body of work that’s changed and that’s interesting from a distance. I don’t want to take [my audience] for granted, so I continue to try to change up the shows, play different venues, and create a catalogue of records that people can look back on and see consistency, but not the same record, over and over again.”
Plaskett sounds like a grizzled veteran at the young age of 33, but he also has eight full-length albums and a slew of EPs to his credit. As he modestly describes where he’d like to end up, it seems that Plaskett would definitely be content to settle into his place as a Canadian music icon. Just not, hopefully, with his face plastered all over US Weekly.
