photo/Ingram Barass

As it turns out, Joel Plaskett is exactly as nice of a guy as I had thought he would be before I met him, if not even more so: it was almost gratuitous how disgustingly charming he is. If I’m not careful, I’m going to have a big, fat, wet and sticky crush all over that affable Nova Scotian, whose latest album Three is far and away his most ambitious album to date – ‘ambitious’ being something of an understatement – quickly becoming a substantial hit, garnering a Polaris Prize nomination along the way and a boatload of new followers for its writer.

Plaskett’s fan base is rabid and loyal, almost cultish in their utter devotion to him. If I were feeling about thirty-percent saucier than I am right now, I would attempt to give Plaskett’s more dedicated fans an affectionate title akin to the Deadheads; the Plaskettes, the Plaskett Basket (of Support) and the FlabberPlaskted spring to mind, but those aren’t very saucy at all. In fact, they’re scarcely worth printing, but here I am doing it anyway. I guess that’s kind of saucy.

I suppose that Joel Plaskett is a pretty saucy guy; either that or it’s just my favorite word of the moment, which is also fine. His boisterous wit and jovial manner are quite alarming, as it becomes abundantly clear even from watching him on stage that this man might in fact be the least ironic man on Earth, or at least the East Coast. Nevertheless he is stingingly funny and severely pointed without ever being sarcastic or snide, which probably makes him on the saucy side as that feels much more an appropriate term than ‘brazen’ or ‘irreverent’.

“I’ve been told I need to work on my bad boy image,” he tells an audience, grinning gigantically, “So I’m going to sing a song about my cat.” The cat in question, White Fang, is mentioned at least twice during my chat with Plaskett, who in addition to waxing feline repeatedly, brought his father Bill along with him on tour as his sole accompanist on acoustic guitar.

“He was involved in the recording [of Three], I would invite him to play guitar on some songs. He’s got a real knowledge of folk music: British folk stuff that I really love, that I inherited from him,” he tells me with regards to his father, who on stage is clearly having an unholy amount of fun playing with his songwriter son. “He taught me the early basics of guitar and pointed me towards a bunch of records by guitar players that are still some of my favorites like Bert Jansch and Richard Thompson – early British folk, the pioneers. And so having his involvement in this, especially on the second disc of Three, my Dad brought a kind of sounding board that adds a certain weight to the songs. Even on the songs that he didn’t play on, it was good to kind of get his read on it."

“Yeah, he’s having a pretty good time, and it’s fun for me because I like to watch him have a good time. It makes touring and shows a little different to have someone along who is kind of experiencing it for the first time. He’s done shows before and played in a lot of different bands, but he was never a touring musician, so he’s getting a kick out of it."

Setting up his home base in the town of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, across the bay from Halifax (pop. 65, 000, in case you were curious; as I was) and resisting the lure of the bigger Canadian cities that so many musicians heed, Plaskett has established himself firmly as a Nova Scotia man and one of the most nationally recognized of East Coast artists. Earlier this year, Plaskett and fellow Halifax-area indie-rockers Wintersleep were chosen to open for Paul McCartney on the only Canadian date of the legend’s tour at Halifax common; the event drew over fifty thousand attendees and surely solidified Plastkett’s claim to the Nova Scotia musical throne.

“I think that people move for a variety of reasons. As musicians, lots of people move to go out and chase more action in another place because it’s easier to gig out of Toronto and Montreal, you don’t have to drive as far. Halifax has not always been the easiest place to make a go of it, but the one thing that I really reaped the benefits of was that I stayed; I kind of got celebrated by my audience for that and as a result, Maritimers came out in droves all across the country and they’re not just there, there’s a million Maritimers out here: they’re everywhere. So I kind of get that support base because I’m from the Maritimes and I’m still there and people really seem to appreciate that.

“That’s obviously not why I did it, but it was a nice side effect.” We are sitting in the Media Services Tent at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival, unseasonably hot, Plaskett with a plate of yellow basmati rice and chicken, some guy keeps coming in and telling me I’ve got only so many minutes left before they’re to throw me out of Plaskett’s face so I want to get my questions in. Guy comes in again and Plaskett shoos him away, “Nah, it’s cool,” he says.

“What was I talking about?”

“Halifax.”

“It’s a great town to make music in. It’s much more affordable to live in. But, by staying and developing an audience there, it was a longer career path in terms of that it’s more expensive to go out on the road, you can’t tour out of there as easily and you’re kind of sequestered from a lot of action.”

Aside from being a local hero, however, Plaskett has made an impression across the country and with the sprawling, twenty-seven track triple-LP, Three, Plaskett has garnered more attention than ever before. Ranging from Plaskett’s trademark, catchy-as-fuck, clever-as-hell indie-pop treats to drunken sea-shanty anthems, to mandolin-and-banjo bluegrass numbers, Three covers a lot of bases and it covers them very well as Plaskett weaves seamlessly from style to style and mood to mood. Effortlessly, he sews his gigantic epic, a culmination of all of his many hats into one magnificent statement.

Unlike, however, the vast majority of such blatant displays of ballsy ambition - which usually results from a lot of leftover songs that the artist didn’t want to cut for whatever reason, leaving the record bloated and full of filler - Three is extremely deliberate, calculated and has been receiving very favorable reviews. It is, for such a modest artist, a monumental achievement and one that Plaskett says he labored over, mostly alone for well over six months tracking, producing and recording it single-handedly.

“It’s a lot to digest and some people will probably say ‘I like that one,’ and go to the song that they like later on the record. It’s a lot, but I put my heart and soul in to all of them and tried to make an expansive record that – I wanted to make a triple record that didn’t have filler. Other people might not see it that way, but I was really trying to keep the themes and the lyrics really important and to make the songs really nice and brief and try to make it consistent, but also with variety.

“But also when there was something that was sprawling it was for a purpose, like the last song, ‘On & On & On’ was to make a point, you know. It’s been a long journey so here’s a sixteen verse song with an outro about my cat.”

Of course there has been much written about Three’s use of its titular number, given that there are three discs, all of which have nine tracks and many of the songs feature a word or phrase repeated three times as their title. However, accounts have been conflicting with regards to the significance of the number three within the record with some sources going to great, romantic lengths to portray Plaskett as being obsessed with numerology with the number three in particular holding a high place in his moral code, while others portray the repetition as merely a whim.

“No I’m not [into numerology], but I am into language, and I’m into repetition. I found that I lot of the stuff that I had been writing at the time, for some reason things in threes seemed kind of – like the idea of triplicate, like how a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. So to me, that was it; if it’s going to be a triple record, then it has to have three distinct pieces. As soon as I got locked on that, I just started playing with the words more and more and just sew it up, make the web strong enough to hold a bunch of spiders.”

It is very plain that Plaskett is, despite his reputation of being very jocular and silly within his music, a very deliberate musician, though he maintains that he tries not to take the artist’s life too seriously.

“Some songs I sit around with a guitar and write, other songs I write a capella, with just a line here or there into a Dictaphone. Often when I’m driving, or walking somewhere I’ll just stumble upon a rhythm or a turn of phrase or a melody that seems kind of  - well, a lot of the time, they seem kind of goofy at first and then I pick a up guitar and think ‘I can make some sense of this.’ I find that that’s been happening more and more as relax into being a writer.

”With the last record being a triple, I just had so many ideas and of course from that the themes just become so apparent. I like to write about traveling, or being alone or being left behind or whatever – there’s lots of that, comings and goings and the kind of loneliness you feel. I feel like playing music is such a blessing and it’s such a great job, but with it comes this sort of altered reality, where I feel like I’m in some sort of teenage bubble, but there is a kind of distance. You have your audience and these relationships with people, but I have to get home, spend time with my wife, decompress and be very present. I’ve been traveling so much, the idea of not moving for a day, I think ‘I’m supposed to be sound checking right now. No, you don’t have a show for two weeks. What?’ So there’s an adjustment there.

“I’m not saying it’s a really hard life, but I write a lot about the fact that you can be busy, but you can also feel alone in your pursuits if you let it get to you. It’s also good to indulge in my goofier instincts as a writer, and that’s the one thing that so many people curb out of a fear of being… But I’m like that sometimes if I’m on the stage with someone that’s a really heavy writer I’ll think ‘I don’t want to play this, this is too wacky for this audience, I don’t want to go to goofball city right now.’

"But if I’m feeling really good and I love being onstage and I’ve got my audience, I like entertaining and I like to laugh and I feel like that sets people up for the more intimate, sadder songs and it gets really real, it’s relaxing you know; I like singing about my cat and shit like that. It’s stupid, but I feel like it’s a way to stay true to what I like and my life off of the stage, which is laughing and telling stupid jokes with my friends and if you take that to the stage, it removes the artifice of the whole thing.”

That sounds pretty genuine to me.