Vintage recorder brings antique sound to Joel Plaskett’s new album

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This article was published 04/10/2024 (390 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Joel Plaskett’s latest album was dressed for this season, its moonlit songs layered beneath its woodsy jacket.

About four years ago, Plaskett was sitting in his home office in Dartmouth, N.S., staring at a blank slate while looking up at the eventual cover painting and others like it, crafted by his wife Rebecca Kraatz in the early 2000s.

“Something about those paintings informed the songs,” says Plaskett, who until One Real Reveal hadn’t released a full-length project since his 44-track album 44, released in 2020 to coincide with his 44th year on Earth.

“It was that way around, not the other way. It wasn’t like she made the art to fit my record. It was more like I was looking at those going, ‘I’d like these to be the images on this record. What kind of record would that sound like?’ And along came this album.”

Since the mid-1990s, Plaskett has been an ever-present and exceedingly busy figure in Canadian independent music, first as a member of the Halifax quartet Thrush Hermit, then as a solo artist — backed by his band the Emergency — reaching a commercial peak with the 2009 album Three (a record that features an extended shoutout to Winnipeg on the wistful highway song Wishful Thinking).

After the pandemic quelled touring efforts, Plaskett was moved to write songs informed by a more internal tourism.

“I think there’s a search for self on the record,” says the singer-songwriter, who plays a sold-out show at the Park Theatre Saturday night. “And then there’s ghosts on the record. A lot of the songs were written under full moons. I would get really awake and I found it to be a good time to write. In that headspace, things would present themselves to me and I would go, ‘Oh, this is something. This isn’t just myself. I don’t feel like I’m alone with my thoughts here. I feel like I’ve got something or somebody else.’ Without sounding too out-there, there was a feeling of another presence, a third energy.”

Using a four-track recording set-up, “the songs took on a hazy shakiness, the warble of the tape machine, the imperfection of the pitch timing. Then I’d let it be and realize I don’t mind the rough edges. I actually appreciate them all. And what was once sort of frustratingly imperfect becomes a kind of patina.”

The new record has the feeling of an antique, because, to record it, Plaskett used the Tascam 244 cassette recorder — the same device a 17-year-old Plaskett borrowed from Charles Austin, a member of the mid-’90s Halifax group the Super Friendz.

“I know that machine,” says Plaskett, who’s intrigued by the discovery potential of digital music but has always leaned toward analog recording and listening.

“You know, when you listen to a song of mine on Spotify, its a WAV file or an MP3, and it never changes pitch, ever,” says Plaskett, who mixed The Church of Better Daze, the debut record by Manitoba artist Boy Golden (who plays the Burt Oct. 20). “It’s frozen and it plays out of your phone the same way it plays out mine.

“When you play the same recording on vinyl or cassette tape, it’s going to play back a little differently every time, depending on the speed of the machine or the dust on the needle. It’s highly relational to every time it plays. And that’s like a human relationship. A conversation. You and I go back and forth. You say something, I respond, we change, and then we get off the phone and we’re different people again at the end of the conversation,” he says.

“My feeling is my relationship with analog technology and my music feels the same way, where it continues to sort of be alive and slightly ephemeral, even though it has the longevity; whereas the digital, fixed moment is powerful for moving it around the world,” he adds. “That’s why I kind of cling to the analog. Because I feel like it is in motion. It moves like the truth.”

Plaskett’s own speed is changing too. At 49, he’s been a full-time touring musician for 30 years.

“I don’t really feel like dragging the pandemic into this conversation around this record,” he says, but it did curtail touring plans for 44. A lot of the songs on One Real Reveal, Plaskett’s 11th album, came from the reminder that even plans written in stone can erode with changing wind and tide.

While the album features several sung verses filled with Plaskett’s gifts for observation, on the track One Real Reveal, he delves into poetry for the first time, placing himself firmly in conversation with other Canadian poet-singers such as Gord Downie and John K. Samson.

“Imagine a seesaw with ‘the past’ sitting on one side and ‘the future’ on the other,” reads a visual aid to The New Joys, a nearly five-minute spoken-word piece. “In the middle is someone trying to get the attention of their better half without completely losing their balance.”

Appropriately, the entire album feels like an artist re-establishing equilibrium, emerging from slowness with a newfound appreciation for the vehicle of his own profession. Weeks into touring, Plaskett is still discovering what it all means.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com