SPILL FEATURE: KIND OF AN ELLIPTICAL WEAVE OR SOMETHING – A CONVERSATION WITH JOEL PLASKETT

KIND OF AN ELLIPTICAL WEAVE OR SOMETHING

A CONVERSATION WITH JOEL PLASKETT

Joel Plaskett first came to music fan’s attention in the early 1990s when he was a member of the band Thrush Hermit. As the band was winding down in 1999, Plaskett was busy with a second band, Neuseiland with members of various Halifax bands. By 1999, even though he was in a band, he was also striking out as a solo artist. His first solo album, In Need Of Medical Attention was released that year. His new album, One Real Reveal is a true solo record, recorded on a four-track recorder. Plaskett takes the listener on a melodic journey into a semi-autobiographical world.

I recently had the opportunity to speak to Plaskett about the album. One that he recorded, pretty much on his own. “I’m happy with it. It is a different record. But the timbre of it is working for me for where I am right now.  I love the way the four tracks captured the record. A single microphone, a nice old vintage one from the 1960s and the four track warble, the kind of hazy nostalgia of sound that you get from a cassette machine, where it doesn’t lock it into pitch modern technology does. It feels more present to me as a sound than a lot of records that are clinical in their capture.”

For One Real Reveal, Plaskett tackled everything, well almost everything, himself.  Armed only with a four-track recorder. It’s all me. I just overdubbed me singing and me playing. The only other person on the record is Bill Stevenson, who plays piano on two songs. There are only four layers. I tend to respond to what I did before. I push myself to keep myself interested and keep my audience interested. But first and foremost, I try to keep myself interested because I’ve done this long enough to recognize that if I follow my own intuition on something, as far as the way I am feeling, it tends to interest people in my audience. It works better than just delivering something for them, like saying ‘here’s what I did last time’.”

Working in this manner proved to have its limitations but the end result was very rewarding. “Even 44, which was that sprawling disc set that came out in 2020, which was a big production with 33 musicians on it, even though it had four frames, four 11-song records that went together to form a complete picture, but there were still frames around everything. In the case of this record, there were still frames, just different frames. I want the frame to be the limitation of four tracks, four overdubs, that’s it. That in itself is hugely limiting, no drums, no bass. It is a very acoustic record, that alone meant I picked songs that worked in that format. Then, how do I keep that interesting? Well, there are a couple of spoken word songs on the record and those little moments you suddenly pay attention in a different way. I realized the little moments of spoken word allowed for a different timbre, even the context of something quiet. So, trying to find limitations within those four tracks.”

The title, One Real Reveal, which is also a song on the album, says a lot about the album. “The phrase showed up in a few tunes. It was also the title of the last track on side one. First and foremost, I just like the way the words sound. There is kind of a tongue twister there. But I like the way it sings when it shows up in the tunes. Sometimes I start there, whatever feels good to sing. From a meaning point of view. The record is an intimate record, sonically as well as lyrically. It is kind of romantic. Real is inside the word reveal, you know if you are looking for something.”

ONE REAL REVEAL ALBUM REVIEW

And although there are aspects of autobiography, Plaskett expands the title and the meaning to a larger extent.

“The line on the title track, “One Real Reveal”, “waiting on one real reveal” and the last line of each chorus, “looking for something real to feel”. That’s part of what is going on for me and the world. There’s all this emotion to feel but trying to get to the ground of it for yourself. In a world where the idea of what is real is a bit suspect. Because so much is digitally delivered, whether it is music you are listening to which is highly produced or AI that was written by a computer. All these questions are coming to the foreground, and for me I just want something to hold on to…but it is the relationship that gives you that sense of what real is. There is a personal, even spiritual underpinning to the record but there is also the recognition of the tension of opposites, human relationships to other people, to another person, to the world is something that needs tending to and the right amount of attention allows for playfulness, allows for romance, allows for give and take. The wrong kind of tension just breaks it. Or you are polarized, which is what we are seeing a lot of right now. So, I wanted a record that played with that tension of opposites, which is really important and may be lost in the times we are living in, at least obscured if not lost.”

Plaskett insists that the album is not entirely autobiographical. “It is kind of dreamlike in some respects. But it does dive into some dream stuff. I think there is something revealing about it. It’s kind of an elliptical weave or something. I don’t know that it always goes directly to, I still like to work a little bit cryptically. But there are a lot of different threads that come together. But I did try to make it feel…I found that in writing and laying the tracks down, I wanted them to feel like getting lost in the language. I can get wordy now and then, but then unadorned in other ways.”

In many ways, this allowed Plaskett to strip back his sound and his lyrics. “It’s like you are tending your garden in a way, knowing where you can leave it to get wild. If that makes sense? It can be unwieldy in certain places and the danger is obscuring something you thought was beautiful and that you want everybody to see. But also knowing what is not going to be there, what weeds and other things that are too showy that need to get it away.”

Plaskett also addresses topics and areas not usually found in popular music. “There is also the idea of the divine feminine. In the artwork my wife did, which wasn’t made for the record, the record was inspired by being in the presence of her artwork. The front cover features a man’s face and the silhouette of a woman in the background and a woman’s face on the back, and you open up the gatefold there are the two of them, and he is down on his knees looking up at her and she has this divine light shining down. It is almost like a religious painting, it is gorgeous. That dance is there in the record too. A song like “Breezy Jane”, ‘Where have you been all my life/You were the whole time but I couldn’t see you’.”

Plaskett is the first to note that it was a difficult album to make. But the end result is a brilliant, creative, interesting and engaging album. But, for Plaskett, every detail had to be attended to.

“It was a challenging record to sequence. I bounced it off a couple of friends. This one took a while. I knew the beginning and most of where the end was, but I was going to end the record with “The New Joys” but “Breezy Jane” is sort of an epilogue. It is like the thought, ‘Before enlightenment chop wood and haul water. After enlightenment, chop wood and haul water’. You realize it is just a perspective shift. You were doing the same thing the whole time, you just have a different perspective on what it is.”

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