Plaskett’s Juno Award-winning music has gone in many directions since the early nineties, traversing genres and subjects.Essery Waller/Supplied
The Nova Scotia musician Joel Plaskett started trading the reactionary, short-form world of the internet for the slow burn of thoughtful books toward the end of last decade, and, in turn, he started turning inward. It was an almost paradoxical thing. He was on the cusp of completing a quadruple record that paid tribute to the world around him, where the people in his life were represented both in studio and in verse.
By the time he released that album in the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing. He had spent more than half of his life as a touring musician, and suddenly he was stuck at home – with his family, of course, but also with his own thoughts. He launched some webcast concert sessions and spread his love of reading by adding a bookstore to his Dartmouth, N.S., studio-slash-emporium, but for the most part, life’s deceleration quickened.
His songwriting has taken several turns in the four-odd years since, and the result was released Friday. If the rollicking rock of 2020′s 44 was Plaskett’s version of maximalism, his newest record, One Real Reveal (via Turtlemusik), is the minimalist result of his inward turn, a nearly all-solo album recorded on a four-track cassette machine.
“In the times we’re in, everything feels quite explicit – and I’m interested in the implicit,” he said in an interview after a record-label showcase last week. “It’s not like I want everything to be completely obtuse. But there’s something about the process of trying to write to leave space for somebody to find themselves in, as opposed to telling them how you think or feel.”
Plaskett’s Juno Award-winning music has gone in many directions since the early nineties, traversing genres and subjects. For the past dozen years, his songwriting had increasingly happened on the fly in the studio, with many songs influenced by real-life friends and experiences. One Real Reveal feels more lived-in and deliberate, a slow ride worth settling into.
One Real Reveal album's cover art was done by Rebecca Kraatz, Plaskett's wife.Supplied
This latest evolution in song began with the sleepy Let Me Go, Jo, written in September, 2020. You can hear him struggling to come to terms with idleness – “The restless don’t settle for rest / No, we sleep on the road,” he sings. But outside of song, Plaskett’s mental shift had already been under way: Hidden on the inside spine of the 44 box set was a quote from Emanuel Swedenborg: “Internal things are those which are represented, and external things those which represent.”
Swedenborg was a scientist-turned-mystic whose works influenced William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, clearly, Plaskett, who took that quote as encouragement to view the material world from new angles. He followed his introspection to England in the summer of 2023. There, he remarked to a friend that everyone around him was carrying themselves with a peculiar intensity – and that there also happened to be a full moon that weekend. His friend pointed out that it wasn’t just a regular full moon: It was a high summer full moon.
Plaskett returned home, and, using a Tascam 244 four-track and a vintage Telefunken microphone that captured the room around him with an encompassing warmth, put a song called High Summer to tape.
The evolution continued, in verse and in style. “Firing on all cylinders, now I’m lost in the woods,” Plaskett sings, “rewired, desiring one real reveal.” Though he first conceived of this voice-and-guitar recording as a demo, he soon realized he’d conveyed everything he wanted. “There’s something about the shaky intimacy of that,” he said.
For the next seven months, Plaskett eschewed the wizardry of his own Dartmouth studio and used the Tascam to capture more of that intimacy. He kept trying new, sometimes intensely personal things as he worked on the record, including spoken-word passages – which, while he spends his time on stage regaling stories, he’d not often tried before on record. One was a poem accompanied on Wurlitzer by Bill Stevenson, and the other, the title track, recounted a waking dream – itself an exercise in excising interiority that owed influence to Swedenborg’s dream journaling.
The warmth Plaskett felt on the English countryside and Blake’s romantic poetry stuck in his mind, too, augmented by a trio of woodburn paintings in his office, which his wife, the artist Rebecca Kraatz, had made decades earlier. One became the cover of One Real Reveal, and another became the physical version’s gatefold art.
They’re cast in what Plaskett calls “a divine light” that gives them the warmth, he feels, of a religious painting. Astute fans will notice that the silhouette on the cover art is the silhouette of the woman in Kraatz’s woodburn cover for early vinyl editions of 2005′s La De Da; the images are from the same series. Plaskett may have shifted his approach to song for One Real Reveal, but he’s still paying tribute to the people he loves.
It was Kraatz who helped Plaskett understand the kind of record he made. Its languorous sound could be interpreted as a darker nighttime album. It’s not; there’s more hope there than nighttime implies. “Oh,” she told him after hearing it. “It’s a morning-before-the-sun-comes-up record.”
Josh O’Kane is the author of Nowhere with You, a 2016 biography of Joel Plaskett.