Plasketts take stage in act of Solidarity
What: Bill and Joel Plaskett When: Tonight (Nanaimo) and Friday (Victoria), 8 p.m. Where: The Queens, 34 Victoria Cres., Nanaimo; Alix Goolden Performance Hall, 907 Pandora Ave. Tickets: $20/$29.50, ticketfly.com It wasn’t long ago that east coast musicians Joel Plaskett and his father, Bill, began doing what other Maritimers have done —headed west, albeit only temporarily in their case.
They began their odyssey this month, journeying to Winnipeg for the March 22 start of a cross Canada tour that ends May 5 in Bayfield, Ont., to showcase their album Solidarity.
The singer-songwriters, and special guests the Mayhemingways, the Ontario folk ensemble, will appear tonight at the Queens in Nanaimo and in Victoria on Friday at Alix Goolden Performance Hall.
While father-and-son have performed together before, Solidarity marks the first time the folk musicians have shared the spotlight for a full-length musical collaboration on a Canadian tour.
Solidarity features original and traditional tunes, including some classic protest songs, that reflect their personal journeys and politics.
Dragonfly, for instance, was inspired by a paranormal experience that Nova Scotia-born Joel, the multiple Juno Awardwinning songwriter claims to have had.
On Down the River, the album’s closing track, reflects his father’s feelings about leaving his home in England, where he was born in 1945.
During the early 1960s, Bill played tenor banjo in a traditional jazz band before going on to play electric bass in a high school rock band.
After travelling through the United States on a “99 days for $99” Greyhound bus pass, he moved to Vancouver before relocating to Nova Scotia.
It was after moving from Lunenburg, N.S., to Halifax in 1987, and becoming part of the city’s folk music scene, that Bill saw his son begin to carve out his own music career with bands from Thrush Hermit to the Emergency.
“As a starting point, I wanted to write a simple folk-song chorus that Dad and I could sing in harmony,” said Joel, 41, explaining his inspiration for their album’s title track.
“The word ‘solidarity’ came to mind as representing togetherness, strength and shared values. I wrote the song to celebrate unity, wherever you can find it, in an increasingly fractured world.”
Album highlights include folkbased political songs We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years and Jim Jones; love songs such as No Sight Compares and New California; the rockabilly country blues-infused number Help Me Somebody Depression Blues; and folk-rock songs with social commentary, including Blank Cheque and The Next Blue Sky.
Friday’s concert at Alix Goolden Hall will mark the second time in two years that Joel Plaskett will perform in the city where his wife, Rebecca Kraatz, used to live.