Credit: Ingram Barss

Triple Threat

Joel Plaskett’s new solo record embraces the triptych

When Joel Plaskett began working on his latest solo album, all he had was a home studio, complete with two-inch tape recorder, a few song ideas and a couple of tracks.

“I wasn’t sure what the record was going to be,” he says. “I wanted to make a record with my dad that would kind of be an acoustic record and I still had some rock and roll-y songs and then I had all these songs in threes, and I just thought, ‘Maybe this is a triple record.’ It started out that I was just joking to myself, and then as soon as the thought went into my head it was like, ‘Okay, this is what I have to do now. Shit.’”

And did he ever do it. Plaskett’s new triple-record, entitled Three, embraces the triptych theme with gusto, reminding us that the man behind the pop success of Ashtray Rock is one of Canada’s most talented songwriters. Three nine-track discs telling stories of departure, travel and return; beginnings, middles and ends; and births, lives and death—with many of the song titles comprised of a single word repeated three times—is a wonderfully understated concept record that took over a year to put together from start to finish.

“I had a great time doing it. I got really overwhelmed by it; there were times where I couldn’t really see it from a distance enough to know if it was any good,” Plaskett says of the concept. “It’s funny, because the initial recording, some of the songs got documented fairly quickly and I was like, ‘This is going to be easy. Boom, here’s another tune.’ But it was finishing them all and just sequencing them and mastering it and doing the artwork, all the finishing touches where you really want to present it in a way that makes sense to people because it’s so much material, that’s what took so much time.”

Plaskett also collaborated with some new folks on Three: his folk-musician father Bill and singer-songwriters Ana Egge and Rose Cousins, who he met up with in Memphis for the North American Folk Alliance Conference last year and invited to sing some backup for him on “Wishful Thinking,” one of the album’s first tracks. Not only did all three musicians appear numerous times on the album, adding new elements such as the penny whistle and female unison singing to Plaskett’s tunes, they’re also on the road with him for his current tour.

“It’s a really unique combination,” says Plaskett of the live lineup. “It’s cool because it’s uncharted territory for me. It’s been a learning curve for me, pacing my adrenaline down a little bit. I get pretty wound up sometimes playing and it’s really fun playing with my dad and playing with the girls, I kind of have to measure the way I play a little bit differently and I like that.”

With an instrument lineup that includes guitars, piano, mandola and drums, Plaskett says the live show—where they’ll be doing two sets with a mix of the new album, old favourites and songs by his tourmates—will be pretty stripped down.

“Because there’s no band at these acoustic shows, it brings a clarity to the new material in terms of your initial listen. People don’t know the new record and then they’re hearing the songs very much on a vocal level,” he says. “I think that’s important because the record is new enough and it’s a lot of material for people to digest, so to come out and play it in a fairly acoustic show, people are going to respond to the songs.”

---------------------
Joel Plaskett and Friends
7pm Sunday, May 10
Alix Goolden Hall, 907 Pandora
Tickets $20
atomiqueproductions.com