Five Questions With Joel Plaskett
Area 506’s Waterfront Concert Series continues for its penultimate weekend in uptown Saint John.
This weekend, concert-goers will enjoy performances from headliners Joel Plaskett Emergency on Friday night and Bahamas on Saturday.
Since Area 506 is all about celebrating New Brunswick and Maritime pride, we’re asking some of this year’s headliners five questions about their favourite Maritime and New Brunswick memories and experiences.
Huddle’s associate editor Cherise Letson spoke with Jimmy Rankin ahead of his show on Long Wharf, but this week, reporter Liam Floyd spoke with Joel Plaskett, frontman of the Joel Plaskett Emergency.
Plaskett is a Juno Award-winning artist and has performed with the Tragically Hip. He runs New Scotland Yard, which doubles as a studio and a record/coffee shop in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia in partnership with Taz Records. Plaskett’s also worked with artists like David Myles, Jimmy Rankin, and Mo Kenney.
Related Podcast: Joel Plaskett: Juno Winner, Music Producer, Coffee Shop Owner
Listen to the full chat about Joel’s favourite spots in the Maritimes, his strangest gigs, and his favourite Atlantic Canadian music in the player above and read the interview below:
Where is your favourite Maritime place to visit on vacation?
I’m definitely partial to Cape Breton Island. Love the West Coast of Cape Breton, warm water there. It sort of just slows down when I get up there in the summer so I do love that. I’m from the south shore. I grew up down in Lunenburg, so sometimes getting down to Lunenberg and Mahone Bay every summer’s really, really nice.
I’m sort of fortunate most years, a little less so this year, to be able to travel around and get to play shows in a lot of places so I get to see at least the cities. But I will admit that I haven’t done a lot of vacationing in New Brunswick. I know that there are a lot of gorgeous places out there and I’m sure I would have some favourites, but usually, I’m working in New Brunswick as opposed to vacation.
What is your most memorable New Brunswick gig?
Yeah, there are a few that come to mind, there are definitely some memorable ones. There was this gig called Floodstock that was kind of rural. It might have been on someone’s property. It was somewhere in between Fredericton and Saint John if I’m not mistaken. That was a really memorable kind of wild gig. [Editor’s note: Floodstock was an annual festival that took place in Lower Kars, New Brunswick. Plaskett played the festival in 2006.]
And then there was this Sunseekers Ball we did out down a dirt road. And all these people just kind of showed up in the woods. I remember driving in kind of late, like the sun was down, we were loading in late, and it was just hard to find the place. [Editor’s note: Plaskett performed at the Sunseekers Ball in Chance Harbour, New Brunswick in 2010.]
Those two are really memorable, just because the venues were unusual. They were felt a little wild, you know? But I’ve also had really, really great gigs in Saint John, actually. The Imperial Theatre comes to mind is one of my favourite venues in the Maritimes and certainly on the water in Saint John as well. We did a bunch of really good gigs there over the years.
What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Saint John?
Brick in that sort of downtown, that’s maybe the first thing that comes to mind. And then I think of the half-size school bus that we bought, we bought two of them over the years in the first early days in the 90s. Both of them came from a place in Saint John. A guy was dealing used vehicles and so we bought these little short buses that we converted into our touring vehicles so I really think of going to Saint John to get those in the 90s.
I think of Saint John in some ways as being like, the feeling of the city… It reminds me of American cities like Portland and things like that, like the architecture of the place. The kind of working-class aspect of it always feels a little bit closer to the United States because, in a way, I guess it sort of is. When I’m in Saint John, I always feel like, like a little bit closer to the U.S. in a way, that’s kind of interesting. Like it has a kind of… romantic’s the wrong word, but it’s not far from that, you know. It’s kind of… I don’t know. I always feel from somewhere else when I’m in Saint John, I guess.
What is your favourite song by a Maritime artist?
Let me think about that. Oh, gosh, there’s a lot of good ones.
This is a great one, it’s a few years old, and I worked on it so I’m biased. There’s a band called Villages who wrote a song a few years ago called “Hymn After Hymn” and they came out of a band called Mardeen. You know, Mo [Kenney] covered a really great Mardeen song called “Telephones.” But “Hymn After Hymn” by Villages or “Telephones” by Mardeen. Different bands, same guys. Both are really exceptional songs. Those come to mind as ones that I would flag today. You know, there are whole piles of great ones.
If I were to go historically for me, a really important song was “I Am The Cancer” by Sloan. That’s a really, really important one for me. I saw Jay [Ferguson] and Chris [Murphy] sing that when I was about 17, on Morris Street in Downtown Halifax, in an apartment there. I was getting to know them, and they just sat and sang that song acoustically before the album came out, and I remember just being kind of blown away. It was like a real education and a really great song.
What is your Maritime meal? Whether it’s something you make at home yourself or buy at a restaurant.
Well, I will say that really great fish and chips kind of makes me think of the Maritimes, you know. And I didn’t like fish as a kid. I mean, I remember like Highliner fish sticks. Growing up in Lunenberg it was all like packaged stuff, I wasn’t even really eating breakfast. Funnily enough, even though there were catching plenty of it down there, they were processing it.
Right now, I’m sort of stuck on a gluten-free diet, unfortunately, but there’s a place in Dartmouth that has gluten-free fish and chips and I got to say it is a total treat. That for me is like a staple of the Maritimes to some degree.
Interview has been edited for length and clarity.