33 rd year. “It was a wisecrack that man-
ifested itself with an idea and lined up
with the age I was at. What happened
with 44, though, in trying to figure out
what kind of record I wanted to make
after Solidarity, none of [my writing]
was going in any one direction. I had all
these songs, but when I tried putting
my favourites onto a single album, it
just didn’t feel like a record.”
He contemplated a double album,
maybe a split between acoustic- and
electric-leaning material. “I was ex-
perimenting a lot, and then I guess I
thought, in the midst of working on this
at 43, I needed to break some habits
and get out of my own studio space.”
Plaskett decided to temporarily
abandon his admittedly insular work-
flow at his New Scotland Yard studio
in Dartmouth and booked sessions
in Nashville and Memphis, eventual-
ly driving from one to the other via
the 440 Parkway and I-40 on his 44 th
birthday in April 2019. Remember the
aforementioned shift from coincidence
to purpose? This was its genesis.
“I’ve always thought of making
a record as putting a frame around a
particular group of songs, but when I
looked at everything I’d been working
on, I realized it worked better as individ-
ual frames within a whole and really dug
into that idea for the artwork and every-
thing – four frames like four panes of a
window, individual but still together, you
know? All of a sudden, these tunes that
were kind of at odds with each other
didn’t need to sit side-by-side; there was
more room for them to exist.”
Subsequently, 44 is comprised
of four 11-song albums with material
recorded in four different cities. First is
41: Carried Away – what Plaskett calls a
“travelling record” that fittingly opens
with “Collusion,” the tune they tracked
live-off-the-floor in Memphis on his first
full day as a 44-year-old. Next is 42:
Just Passing Through, which explores
the “feeling of returning home to an
unfamiliar landscape,” and its counter-
part, 43: If There’s Another Road, where
home starts to feel like home again.
Finally, there’s 44: The Window Inn, the
“arrival at a personal destination” and a
satisfying tying of loose ends.
Overall, it’s a record about intro-
spection, about exploring one’s inner
thoughts and how our individual relation-
ship with the world is informed not just by
our past and memories, but also how we
choose to live in the present. One over-
arching theme examined through four
unique lenses – or window panes – and,
PACKAGE ARTWORK FOR
44 BY INGRAM BARSS,
WITH EACH INDIVIDUAL
ALBUM COVER REPRE-
SENTED AS A SINGLE
PANE IN THE FOUR-PANE
WINDOW. EACH PANE
DEPICTS ITEMS RELATED
TO ITS ALBUM’S THEMES.
to an even more significant degree than
Three, numerical and thematic interplay
for days.
“The concept informed a lot of
the writing,” Plaskett admits of the
songs born after he’d settled on it.
“There are songs where you can really
hear me weaving the number game
in pretty heavily. But for all of it, it was
like, once the tap was turned on, why
would I shut it off?”
Despite the grandiosity of the
concept and many dimensions he
explores as part of it, this is still a Joel
Plaskett record through and through
(and through), revisiting many chapters
of the artist’s musical anthology so far
while also introducing some new ones.
There are the rockier numbers
sometimes anchored by The Emergen-
cy, Plaskett’s longtime rhythm section
of drummer Dave Marsh and bassist
Chris Pennell, fun folk-rock anchored
by his beloved lyrical quirks, touching
ballads rich with East Coast candor, and
much in between. There are covers and
live recordings, co-writes and collab-
orations (with a total of 33 musicians
lending their talents to the project),
altogether comprising about two-and-
a-half hours of music.
Ultimately, 44 is the product of an
artist whose identity and status have
long been established investing all of
himself into the creative process with-
out regard for convention, protocol, or
anyone’s approval. One could say the
same about previous albums like Ash-
tray Rock or Three that found the artist
experimenting with higher concepts,
but here, it’s palpable throughout. If 44
is, as Plaskett describes it, “an exercise
in finding his own sense of place in his
40s,” the listener can only believe that
at the end of its creation, he’d found it.
“It’s a lot, man,” Plaskett says nearing
the end of our conversation. “I recog-
nize that the record is so much that, with
anybody I’ve talked to, getting a grip on
it is sort of hard. I can talk about these
songs because I know them really well,
but there’s just so much material. And
to be honest, that was the idea – if you
want to engage with it, you kind of have
to take the whole thing. You can take it
in pieces, and that’s totally cool, but to
get more out of it requires a lot of time.
“I don’t want to paint it as more
than what it is, but it was a really interest-
ing project to work on, and it revealed
itself in ways that really surprised me.”
As an artist – especially one at this
stage of an impressive career – that’s
really all you can ask for, and as a listener
– especially in today’s increasingly
transient music landscape – maybe
even more so.
Andrew King is the Editor-in-Chief of
Canadian Musician.
CANADIAN MUSICIAN 45