To open a recording studio and launch a record label in these days of economic uncertainty takes confidence. To release your own triple album at the same time requires something more like audacity. Yet Joel Plaskett has done exactly that.

The Nova Scotia musician, an indie-rock hero since his Thrush Hermit days in the 1990s, hatched the ambitious plan last year after finding a recording space in his hometown of Dartmouth, N.S., and purchasing some old analogue equipment. The studio, which he named Scotland Yard, enabled Plaskett to produce several local artists for release on his New Scotland Records label while allowing him to record a sprawling collection of his own songs.

Plaskett’s album, Three, is aptly named since it comes as both a triple CD (released on MapleMusic) and triple vinyl set (available through New Scotland). Many of the song titles involve three-time repetitions, such as “Run, Run, Run,” “Down, Down, Down” and “Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’.” It also stands as a concept album, with each disc thematically linked to issues affecting a travelling musician: leaving home, getting homesick and returning to one’s roots.

Such conceptual legwork and numerological attention to detail (Plaskett also recorded most of the album when he was 33) bear the mark of an obsessive. And Three could be dismissed as just a novelty or vanity project. But the 27 songs are uniformly strong, a mix of heartfelt country ballads, Celtic-tinged folk tunes, freewheeling rockers and horn-driven soul numbers, featuring some of Plaskett’s best lyrics, with stark confessionals and plenty of witty wordplay.

In fact, Three is a landmark Canadian album and a high-water mark in Plaskett’s discography, an impressive body of work that also includes two Thrush Hermit albums and three recordings with his band, Joel Plaskett Emergency, including the Polaris Prize-nominated Ashtray Rock. For his latest, Plaskett sings and plays guitars, piano, bass and drums but is often joined by his guitarist father, Bill Plaskett, and two singers, Halifax’s Rose Cousins and Saskatchewan-born/Brooklyn-based Ana Egge.

Plaskett traces the inspiration for Three and, later, Scotland Yard and New Scotland Records to a trip he made to Memphis in early 2008. “I had been compiling a lot of songs on my iPod dictaphone, which is what I record on when I’m travelling,” he recalls. “I was making notes about the material and started to notice a lot of lyrical connections, like songs that repeated the same word three times. Once I saw the pattern, I just started connecting the dots.”

After recording “Wishful Thinking” at the Memphis studio of his friend Doug Easley, who’d produced Thrush Hermit’s Sweet Homewrecker album, the songwriting floodgates opened. “I suddenly felt myself entering a really creative phase,” says Plaskett. “I think the travelling sparked that, plus the fact that I really had something to write about. The songs just started coming fast and furious.”

One of the next songs to pop out — and the first to repeat a word three times — was “Gone, Gone, Gone.” “I love language and repeating myself in my writing, and I’ve always like writers who used the same phrases, like Chuck Berry and Bruce Springsteen,” says Plaskett. “On this record, I found the more I repeated myself, the more it held together thematically.”

Plaskett’s other discovery was how much the voices of Cousins and Egge added to his music. “There’s a lot of counterpoint that I created for them,” he says. “Their voices blend beautifully together, and because they’re singing in unison so much, they become like this weird third person that you can’t quite identify.”

Plaskett’s dad also filled a major role. Bill, a longtime musician who works as a heritage planner in Halifax, has sometimes performed with Joel and played banjo on the Joel Plaskett Emergency’s Down at the Khyber album. But Three represents their first major studio collaboration and it resulted in more of a folk-oriented, Maritime sound than any previous Plaskett recording. “There are some nuances with how my dad and I play together,” says Joel. “When we play, I realize how much I’ve inherited from him and his style. He can play quite grounded, super-square, folk, rhythmic playing. I can be more flighty, which makes for a neat weave.”

At one point, Plaskett had wanted to make an entire album with his father. He also dreamed of doing something soulful with horns. “But I also really wanted to do a stark acoustic record,” he says, and he had both a surplus of songs and a new studio to record them in. “It dawned on me that I could make a triple album. I had a lot of slow, blue songs, so I knew one of the albums could be moodier and more downtempo. Then I realized I could frame that record with two others that had more levity.”

Has he ever thought of himself as prolific? “I’ve never had trouble writing songs,” admits Plaskett. “I turned a corner with my album La Di Da, when I drove down to Arizona to record it and hadn’t yet written most of the songs. I had a few ideas, but I wrote a lot of the lyrics on my dictaphone as I drove. I got there, finished the album and was really happy with it, even though it was created on the fly. Realizing I could do that really freed me up.”

That freedom carried over to Three. A lot of its songs were written and recorded the same day. Plaskett says he didn’t want to toil over pitch-perfect singing or strive for the ultimate, definitive performance if the take felt right. “Part of the reason why the Emergency is not on this record, with the exception of one song,” he explains, “was so that I could move quickly. I didn’t want to have to rehearse the material. For me, it was more important whether the composition was good or not.”

Plaskett’s focus on songwriting is one of the qualities he brings to his production work for other artists. So far, he’s produced two albums for Charlottetown guitar-pop band Two Hours Traffic and has just completed work on a third. Plaskett has also produced singles for Egge, Peter Elkas, Tyler Messick and Yellow Jacket Avenger, all recorded at Scotland Yard and released through his New Scotland label, whose proud motto is “From Dartmouth to Your Doorstep.”

“I really love lyrics,” says Plaskett, “so if I’m producing someone I like to ask them what the song is about and get right to the heart of what that is. I try to balance that with not mucking too much with somebody’s thing if it’s idiosyncratic and cool. Then I try to heighten what they’re doing for the people who don’t know their stuff.” He adds: “I also love great instrumental playing. I’ve recorded three songs with a local band called Myles Deck & the Fuzz, who play a Stooges-like thing, with shades of Thin Lizzy and the Stones, really scrappy but a lot of fun. I learn something with every project.”

Uploaded Summer 2009

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Send them to Rick MacMillan, Words & Music Corporate Editor, at wordsandmusic@socan.ca.