A tisket, a tasket, a triple album from Joel Plaskett

Joel Plaskett
Thursday, 14 May at 7pm
McDougall United Church (10025–101 St)
$20 at ticketmaster.ca

“I’m kind of obsessive. My mind won’t shut off at night, is what it boils down to, and with this record—it’s just a pile of words. There were so many words. I get kind of giddy and I’ll start to just rhyme stuff.”

Joel Plaskett might consider himself an imperfect perfectionist. Sitting at a Toronto pub chatting jovially about the construction of Three, his recently released triple disc solo album centred around the titular number, the folk rocker mentions how easily he got swept up in the concept of finding instances in life that revolve around the number three.

For example, he was 33 years old, so he initially recorded 33 songs that he eventually pared down to 30, with the additional three coming to appear on an upcoming EP called Three More. The album has three discs, the majority of the tunes have a title with the same word repeated three times, the lyrics deal with coincidences that occur in triplet, and most of the songs have Plaskett along with his fellow singer-songwriters Rose Cousins and Ana Egge backing him up with harmonies. Each third of the triple set deals with a different topic of reflection: departure, loneliness, and return.

However, Plaskett eventually yanked himself back, as he didn’t want to “become a slave to the concept” which is why the album tightened up to a final 27 pieces. While he was a stickler with the theme—even setting up parts of his studio in sets of three—the Halifax native specifically left in tiny flaws in the recordings to make his music more organic.

“The thing is, you can’t get carried away,” Plaskett explains. “I’ve recorded in situations where you’ve got a computer and you can make things perfect or whatever, but I’ve always liked things to breathe. I like idiosyncrasy. That’s not to say that I don’t toil over things and go ‘this doesn’t feel right’ and then I don’t put it out until it does. It’s just a weird thing and it’s highly subjective.

“Something can be flawlessly executed and perfectly in time and it can feel like a wet rag. It can feel, I don’t know—cold […] I’m getting more and more into the idea of getting into the moment with a recording and letting it be. If there’s mistakes on it, hopefully it feels good and you leave them.”

Even with the minor errors and blemishes that Plaskett specifically left lying around throughout his work, there were still times when he wondered if the entire thing was any good at all. Thankfully for his fans, he didn’t make like a tortured artist and torch it all in a rage.

“It’s like if you’ve been staring at a picture for too long and you know you start seeing the flaws in it, or you just can’t tell if it’s any good,” he notes. “It’s a tenuous relationship sometimes when you’re making art and you’re really attached and proud of it, and really excited and invigorated by it. Like, that’s why I get out of bed, to rock it on tape, or on a stage. But then you’re also fatigued by it, and you’re like “Oh my God, is this all I am?”

Though he describes himself as a very music-centric person, that isn’t all that Plaskett is. As he runs through a list of the other parts of his life, he’s a devoted husband to his wife Rebecca, who is a graphic artist currently working on a new comic, and he loves his aging kitty cat White Fang. Plus, he says that he’s a fan of pulp fiction.

“I love film noir, I love old movies. I love that stuff. I like fedoras,” he laughs. “That’s kind of why I like Elvis Costello, he’d always have lines that rang like old movie dialogue like ‘Everytime I phone you, I just want to put you down.’ I like stuff that sounds like if a dame said it to you in a movie, you’d be like, ‘that’s crazy.’ ”

And two things are particularly clear from talking to Plaskett: he’s a wordsmith and he likes to talk. He sounds like just the guy who could turn a pile of words into something worth listening to.

“I like words and language, so I like the idea of communicating something and I like when people are like—I don’t mind when people are mean or snarky because for me, it makes for more interesting dialogue and more of a conversation if someone challenges what you believe in.” He laughs again, and clarifies: “But I don’t like assholes.”