Joel Plaskett releases new album before city date

By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on September 13, 2024.

East Coast artist Joel Plaskett is releasing his latest album "One Reveal on Wheels" today and is set to play the Geomatic Attic on Oct. 2.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

Friday the 13th may be an ominous day for many but for Joel Plaskett it’s the day to release his latest album.

Plaskett, who has forged a long music career by attracting audiences with a range of musical styles, is releasing what he feels is his most contemplative body of work yet.

And Lethbridge audiences will hear some of it for themselves when the East Coast artist plays the Geomatic Attic on Oct. 2.

“One Real Reveal” is the name of his latest offering which Plaskett is supporting on a cross-country solo tour.

Rock fans will known Plaskett from his work with Thrush Hermit, the Joel Plaskett Emergency, as well as his solo work.

No stranger to Lethbridge, Plaskett has fond memories of playing at the old Tongue ‘n Groove in the early part of the 2000s and he knows well the Geomatic Attic stage.

“It’s been a long time,” Plaskett said in a phone interview this week about his last appearance in the city.

“It’s a quiet sort of contemplative record, it was made on a four-track cassette machine with a single microphone so it’s a very sparse record,” Plaskett said of the new record.

“It’s got kinda of an almost singular sound or a kind of very spartan sound. It’s intimate, it’s an intimate record and I was thinking of it sort of as when I was making it as a night-time record,” in the vein of Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska”, said Plaskett.

His wife Rebecca, however, told him it’s “a morning before the sun comes up record and I thought that was a better way to put it because it isn’t a dark record per se or melancholy but it’s like darkness with the light on the horizon kind of album. It’s a bit romantic, I think in some respects,” Plaskett added.

After more than three decades, Plaskett still loves making music. He left high school directly into a music career with Thrush Hermit when he was 18 and never fathomed doing anything else.

He says he’s still figuring out his musical journey.

“I’m driven to make stuff, I’m driven to record, I love the process and I like performing. I still like that connection, that kind of relationality, the feeling of connecting and sharing an experience,” said Plaskett.

The self expression of making records is important to him and he’s stayed in music by the fact he gets bored if does the same thing repeatedly.

“So I sort of try to change it up in some ways, put some different parameters” around what he’s doing, he said.

He will be performing two sets per concert and calls it an interesting show with a bit of a visual component.

“Even though it’s a quiet record, I think it’s going to be a fun show.”

A solo show lends itself to storytelling, he said, but when the whole band is on stage playing rock ‘n roll he doesn’t talk a lot to the audiences.

“When you’re by yourself, I can kind of inform the songs a little differently or even take requests or kind of go to different places in the catalog.”

On tour, he wants to play some of the new record as well as certain older songs audiences want to hear.

“I enjoy singing songs that people know.”

His shows sometimes change to night and city to city with some having connections to different places.

“Once you get going on a tour you start to get a sense of what works. Every once in awhile you walk into a different room and there’s a different group of people or a different space that sounds different,” he said.

“Sometimes the material sounds really good in certain spaces.”

Plaskett likes different venues and different sized spaces and a big reason why he’s had an audience for so long has to do with the fact he’s done rock shows, folk festivals and small clubs.

“I have a pretty wide demographic of people so my audience becomes kind of a mix of folks who have been to the rock shows, the solo shows, what have you. Some people maybe kind of gravitate to one or the other a little more but by and large a lot of my audience comes to all of it because it sort of ping pongs and changes venues and changes presentation. Which makes it fun for me because I don’t always feel like I’m doing the same thing. I tend to find if I follow my own intuition on what works, usually my audience is there with me which is rewarding,” Plaskett added.

Over the decades Plaskett has toured with such artists as Sloan and The Tragically Hip and with his dad Bill, who was a cofounder of the Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival. He’s also been an opener for the legendary Paul McCartney.

His discography includes 1999’s “Clayton Park,” the second and last full Thrush Hermit record and his first solo record “In Need of Medical Attention” which was also released in 1999. The album “Down at the Khyber” by The Joel Plaskett Emergency in 2001 brought him to the attention of a bigger audience and earned him a Juno nomination as best new artist.

Plaskett is also a producer for other artists with his credit on records by artists such as Sarah Slean, Mo Kenney, Colleen Brown, Dave Marsh, Old Man Luedecke and Jimmy Rankin.

His tour starts Tuesday in Nanaimo, B.C. and takes him to venues across Canada through late November.

Many of the earlier shows are already sold out including four in Calgary before he reaches Lethbridge.