‘I no longer have that live itch’
Ex-albertan now sparking song ideas in Nashville
When Mike Plume drives to work every morning, he passes the studio where Neil Young laid down his classic album, Harvest, and Bob Dylan recorded Blonde on Blonde.
He lives five blocks from the house where Elvis Presley wrote Heartbreak Hotel, and just down the street from Hank Williams’s last residence. How cool is that?
“It’s very cool, and it immediately trumps anything else that might be bad about where I live,” laughs the ex-Albertan and current resident of Nashville, where he now works as a songwriter. “Hank rented the house with (singer) Ray Price after his second wife kicked him out of his mansion. I walk past that house every day, and every time I look in there and I think ‘I wonder if he wrote I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive in there?’”
Plume, who spent his formative years in Bonnyville, might have wondered the same thing about himself at one point.
He and his band toured mercilessly for more than a decade until he called a halt to start a family in 2002, but for a time it seemed that the road might swallow him up whole.
The work ethic continued, even if he wasn’t putting the miles on anymore.
He released a solo album called Table for One in 2003, followed by Rock and Roll Recordings … Volume 1 a year later, but he cut down his live appearances to a handful over the next four years.
There were sporadic reunions with his ex-band, a self-sustaining unit called The Populars, and there was a new album in 2009 called 8:30 Newfoundland, but Plume deliberately kept a low profile.
Even now, with planned rerecordings of his first two albums (Jump Back Kerouac and Songs from a Northern Town) plus two albums worth of new material, he still has no plans to revisit his road warrior days, at least not in earnest.
“I just like hanging out with my kid,” he says. “I coach her hockey team. In Nashville I’m the songwriter who lives down the street. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on something by not touring all the time, and I no longer have that live itch. At the same time, I like coming out and doing a run of shows. Could I tour more? Yes. Should I tour more? Yes, I could probably build up a head of
It’s very cool, and it immediately trumps anything else that might be bad about where I live
MIKE PLUME
steam, and I don’t rule that out in the future.
“But right now my daughter is eight, and every time I leave to play a show and call back home, something amazing happens that I’m not there for, like Ruby getting her first hat trick. Great, I’m in Dryden, Ont., and I’ve missed it.”
Back in Nashville, he’s under contract to a publisher to deliver a certain number of songs a year.
Plume hangs around the house playing acoustic guitar for hours at a time for fun, but self-effacingly insists that he hasn’t become any better for the effort. He hangs out with songwriters like Kieran Kane, throwing ideas back and forth until one of them sparks.
“Mostly we just talk a lot, because as you can tell I really like to talk, and suddenly someone will say something that might be a song title and away we go.”
Plume may think of his songwriting sessions as just a bunch of guys sitting around and talking, but they have borne fruit.
Last year one of his efforts, Mine All Mine, showed up on the season-ending episode of the FX show Justified.
“It could not have been any cooler. The main character is walking into an Airstream trailer that doubles as a brothel, and there’s a woman in lingerie grinding to my song, which is playing on the radio.”
The song made some kind of an impression on viewers, leaping to the top of Plume’s iTune sales list.
“I guess people watch the credits to see who wrote the songs. I was a little stunned by it all.
“If I have luck here and there with songs like that, then that justifies the contract that my publisher has with me, so that’s all right. I just keep on trucking and hope to get a few more like that.”