TIME FLIES

“MAYBE IT’S THE heat melting my mind,” Rob Benvie began his email. “I’m in India for the summer, where it’s pretty ruthlessly hot and it gets to you after a while.”

He was there working on his second book, Maintenance, and had been looking through his iTunes library when he came across “Strange to Be Involved,” a song about unrequited efforts and unresolved circumstances that he’d written for Sweet Homewrecker. “It struck me,” his email continued, “that if we are ever going to follow through on any long-imagined Hermit reunion show(s), this winter would be the time. Ten years after and all that.”

Since they parted ways in December 1999, Thrush Hermit’s members had occasionally collaborated — Benvie and McGettigan in Camouflage Nights, McGettigan and Plaskett in the Emergency, and various other combinations for one-off gigs in Halifax and Montreal. Nothing serious, though. But in 2009, Benvie put forward the idea of a serious reunion. “It’s funny,” he says now. “As much as I was the instigator of our breakup, it was me who set it in motion.”

Anything that happened would require finding gaps in four very busy schedules — writing, touring, producing, and day jobs would get in the way. They also had to decide how it would play out. The four members began to exchange calls and emails. They had a lot of questions to answer: on what scale could they make something happen? Would they release new songs? Re-release old ones? Would people care? Would they come to shows?

“I’m sure we all have our own individual visions,” Benvie’s email concluded, “but I think there’s a way we could do it that would be classy, potentially lucrative, and most importantly fun.”

Enough people got involved in the conversation that rumours began to swell. In December, Plaskett confirmed to media that the band would reunite for a handful of shows in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Ontario. The plans soon ballooned. At Christmas, Benvie went over to Plaskett’s in Dartmouth, and they talked about what to release with the tour. “I think we’d had a few whiskeys, and we kind of just decided, Let’s put everything out,” Benvie says. “Let’s just put every single thing we’ve ever recorded out as a box set, kinda knowing it would be a money loser, but the die-hards would appreciate it. And so that’s what we did. We were always ambitious dudes, and this release thing spiralled out of control.”

The band announced a box set, The Complete Recordings, in February. Save for a few loose recordings Plaskett found later — like a bootleg of a show at CBGB’s in New York — the box set compiled nearly everything, from early singles on Bong Load and Genius to a sound collage of the band’s first junior-high recordings as Nabisco Fonzie. “If I wanna put my ’90s self in a box,” Plaskett says, “this is it.”

The classic lineup — Plaskett, Benvie, McGettigan, and Cliff Fenwick Gibb — set on a nine-date tour in March, including two sold-out nights at Lee’s Palace in Toronto, bringing along their giant neon ROCK & ROLL sign, which McGettigan had kept for good measure. “Those were some of my favourite Thrush Hermit shows of all time,” Cliff says. “I thought we were at the top of our game.” Many were sold out, with both cult and new fans in attendance. They even held a third, all-ages show at Lee’s Palace — opening their shows up to fans-turned-parents and, perhaps, a new demographic of supporters who would have been eight or younger at the time of the Hermit’s demise. “It was thrilling, ’cause it was so many years later and they were all such good musicians,” says their longtime manager Angie Fenwick Gibb. “It was seeing the Thrush Hermit I always knew they could be.”

Benvie, McGettigan, Fenwick Gibb, and Plaskett at Lee’s Palace in 2010.
[© Pete Nema]

It was a one-off reunion, but it felt like a second chance, an opportunity to play music together unshackled from the expectations and discord that plagued their first run. The raw enthusiasm from fans old and new completely validated the mountain of effort the Hermit and their team had put in in the ’90s. The members’ paths had diverged wildly in the past decade, but getting back together felt natural. And they were tighter than ever. “We played better than we did back in the day,” says Plaskett, who busted out his Sweet Homewrecker era green gas-station uniform for the shows. “We were just all so much more relaxed and having fun, ’cause we were all friends again and excited about the fact that we were playing. It didn’t have the same baggage as the last year the Hermit had.” The members had done everything they could to make the band work in the ’90s, says Benvie, and calling it quits “was a little sad.” But the 2010 reunion, he says, “bookended it in a nice way that it wasn’t sad at all.”

BENVIE HAD BEEN among the throngs bemoaning the inflated major-label hype on Halifax in the mid-’90s, and he unknowingly predicted the bubble’s end in a 1994 interview with MuchMusic. “It’s more important murderecords or Cinnamon Toast Records exists,” he said, “so that Halifax won’t self-destruct once all the attention leaves — which it will.” Some 16 years later, those specific local labels were dust, but his argument had long been proven right. Halifax’s musical community was happy to thrive on its own. And so it was fitting that the Hermit’s The Complete Recordings box set came out on Plaskett’s New Scotland Records, a label somewhere near the centre of Halifax’s new self-sustaining music ecosystem. Since its inception in 2008, New Scotland has reissued Plaskett’s whole post-Hermit back catalogue on vinyl and put out a series of split seven-inches with artists like Shotgun Jimmie and Jeremy Fisher. It’s also put out CDs and LPs for everyone from Dave Marsh, Al Tuck, and Peter Elkas to new faces like burgeoning Halifax songwriter Mo Kenney.

With his Scotland Yard studio, Plaskett planted his roots even more firmly in Halifax, shifting some of his work from the road to home as he produced records for Kenney, Two Hours Traffic, Jewel collaborator Steve Poltz, and New Brunswick’s David Myles. Myles, a singer-songwriter who now hosts The East Coast Music Hour on CBC Radio in Halifax, had met Plaskett through Sheri Jones and began to get to know him better as they watched NBA playoffs at the same bar. They started discussing records and, fresh off Three, Plaskett mentioned he was getting more into producing. Some songs were exchanged, and soon Myles was in Scotland Yard recording his 2010 record Turn Time Off. “When he gets into something, he gets into it full-on,” Myles says. “He really listens to what other musicians do, in terms of his production style, and rather than trying to focus on what makes it the same as other people, he really focuses on what’s different. I think that goes hand-in-hand with his general philosophy about why he chooses to live here, why he chose to build his business here.”

At the studio, Plaskett also wrote and recorded “On the Rail,” an ode to Cape Breton’s Cabot Trail, which became a finalist for CBC’s Great Canadian Song Quest in 2009. In 2011, he gathered that song and others — demos, outtakes, and one-offs like the Abbey Road song “When I Go” — for the vinyl-and-CD collection EMERGENCYs, false alarms, shipwrecks, castaways, fragile creatures, special features, demons and demonstrations.

By then, it was clear that Plaskett was never satisfied with just releasing an album for the sake of an album. He had gotten used to fresh challenges: a road trip to a foreign studio in Arizona, a rock opera, a triple record. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard Joel talk about an idea that didn’t actually come to fruition,” says Peter Elkas. This time, Plaskett found inspiration with “On the Rail,” which he’d heard on CBC Radio the day after he’d completed it. The notion of writing an album’s worth of songs, each on a deadline — rather than packaging them all together and waiting months for a finished product to come out — made for a fine new challenge.

Sheri Jones tried to talk him out of it, she says, “but the more I thought of it, the more I realized that it was such a cool idea.” She got in touch with producers at CBC and commercial radio, and they bought into the concept, too. Soon, it was a done deal. The three-piece Emergency convened in Scotland Yard at the beginning of 2012 and began recording a song a week, documenting the process with YouTube videos.

The first song to emerge was “You’re Mine,” a twin to Ashtray Rock’s “Soundtrack for the Night” both in its theme — celebrating the joy of making rock ’n’ roll — and in its lyrical nods to Hüsker Dü’s “Pink Turns to Blue.” They recorded nine more songs in the following weeks, including the Maritime anthem “Harbour Boys,” which, too, lionizes making music, and “I’m Yours,” a love song with more than a hint of autobiography. Never too far from a Plaskett project, Ian McGettigan lent his hands as an engineer for both “Tough Love” and “Time Flies.” By March, the sessions finished with “Lightning Bolt,” a six-and-a-half-minute anthem that would come to be the album’s eventual opener and a concert staple.

A control freak by nature, Plaskett tends to dwell on the details of a song until they’re perfected, but he couldn’t do that this time. The record that sprung from these sessions, he says, “found its feet as it went along.” Lyrically, he’s quite happy with it — he doesn’t consider a song finished until he’s content with the words — but there are some songs, like “Slow Dance,” that he walked away from too early to be 100 percent satisfied. Others, like “North Star” and “I’m Yours,” have become personal favourites and live hits, and he’s particularly happy with the lyrics for “Old Friends” and “Lightning Bolt,” a pair of songs that approach life, aging, and adulthood from different angles.

Chris Pennell demonstrating his elk-like strength with Dave Marsh after a 2012 Halifax concert.
[© Craig Buckley]

When the weekly sessions were finished, Plaskett called up his manager to talk album art. He told her he wanted it to be the bust of Wayne Newton he planned to keep onstage with him on the subsequent tour. She relented, and an hour later he conveniently sent her another finished cover idea: a mechanical guitar-playing monkey. Jones remains convinced Plaskett was trying to fake her out, but admits “his weirdest ideas always work.” On tour, he took that weirdness a step further. On top of the Newton bust, he brought along two of those monkeys, wired to a guitar pedal to dance on his command.

The Emergency playing in Halifax after the Scrappy Happiness release in 2012.
[© Craig Buckley]

Plaskett called the album Scrappy Happiness, and released it in full later that spring. This time, his ambitions had an unexpected side effect. It only sold half as well as Three — in part, at least, because the individual songs had already been available so long on iTunes and CBC’s website. But the fast-and-loose recording tactic gave the album an energy that did not go unnoticed. The Toronto Star declared the “rough-around-the-edges” project a “summer-perfect” record, while the Halifax Chronicle-Herald couldn’t help but point out its “unbridled joy.”

AFTER RECORDING AND touring Scrappy Happiness, Plaskett started finding more joy at home. While his jaunts on the road still packed punch — he did another residency at the Horseshoe Tavern, this time for five nights — he’d gained a few reasons to hang around town more often. In the summer of 2012, he took possession of a building in downtown Dartmouth with an old fur warehouse in the back and began to renovate it. The old Scotland Yard was a fine place for a studio, but it was rented — and, to be fair, barely more than just a shack. Here, New Scotland Yard was born: an expansive studio Plaskett could call his own, free for him to set up and use as he pleases. With it, he’s built a reputation as a recording kingpin, working with his in-house studio engineer Thomas Stajcer to produce records for the likes of Mo Kenney and ex–Great Big Sea member Séan McCann. Vice has even called him “Halifax’s Rick Rubin.” David Myles, who recorded his 2014 album It’s Christmas at New Scotland Yard, says the studio is part of a growing local infrastructure making the Halifax area better for musicians. “Hopefully, as things develop,” he says, “it’ll give people less reason to feel like they need to leave.”

The professionally outfitted space lets him work on projects without always hitting the road — an option that’s grown particularly important to him. In April 2011, he and Kraatz adopted a son, Xianing, from China. Parenthood has become a priority he’s grateful for, but it’s made him much more hesitant to leave home, especially for long stretches. Music has always been his life’s passion, and Kraatz, he says, has always helped him keep that in the foreground. But with fatherhood, he’s begun to reflect more on how he spends his days. He feels he owes time to his son and makes sure he gives it to him. “Adopting him and becoming a parent has definitely been the biggest challenge of my life, as well as put music into perspective in a way that I really enjoy,” he says. “I feel that it’s made me stronger.”

Since he started spending more time at home, some friends have taken to calling him the “Mayor of Dartmouth.” He’s hesitant to accept such a title, which might better belong to born-and-bred Dartmouth native Matt Mays, who immortalized the town in the song “City of Lakes.” Still, he’s become a well-known entrepreneur in its downtown, with neighbours regularly stopping him on the street to chat. In October 2015, he expanded his Dartmouth empire even further by opening the New Scotland Emporium adjacent to his studio on Portland Street. Shoppers can stop by and grab a coffee (courtesy of Dartmouth’s Honey & Butter), pick up LPs (courtesy of Halifax’s Taz Records), and give their hair a trim at Elk’s Haircutting (courtesy of the Elk himself, Chris Pennell). It’s the ultimate clubhouse, and a way to stay entrepreneurial without straying far from home. But on occasion, too, he gets beckoned to hop westward across the harbour to Halifax proper. In 2014, the Khyber Centre for the Arts was shuttered, in need of $4 million in repairs. Halifax’s municipal council considered selling it, which likely would have seen the 19th-century Gothic Revival building torn down for new development. Plaskett became the face of the “Save the Khyber” movement, urging the city to conserve the heritage building where he met his wife and recorded his personal Down at Muscle Shoals. He showed up to the meeting where Councillor Waye Mason — another pop-explosion survivor, having founded No Records two decades earlier — tabled a 2,300-signature petition to ask the city to keep the Khyber. Councillors, joking about the local celebrity in their midst, voted to keep it under the city’s stewardship. Its future still remains uncertain, but Plaskett has kept up his support, even when on the road, selling “I Met My Love Down at the Khyber” shirts to fans across the country with proceeds going toward the Save the Khyber movement.

FOR A FEW weeks in early 2014, an enormous poster of Plaskett’s face was draped on the side of Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, one of Canada’s premiere performing arts venues. Having played twice with Symphony Nova Scotia in Halifax since 2006, he was invited to perform a one-night-only concert with the centre’s house orchestra. The show, in April, nearly sold out. Backed by dozens of woodwind, string, and percussion players, the songs took on new lives: the growing tension of “Light of the Moon” exploded with timpani roars, and a chorus of basses and cellos turned “Lightning Bolt” thunderous. “I’m Yours” got slightly lighter accompaniment, but that didn’t stop an audience member from proposing to his girlfriend during the tune, sending gasps, then claps, throughout the audience. The sound of an orchestra is always a force to be reckoned with, but Martin MacDonald, who conducted the evening, says “with an artist like Joel, who is larger than life onstage — the effect that it had was great.”

Plaskett played a couple of new songs that night, including one he called “The Park Avenue Sobriety Test.” It was a cheerful-sounding, call-and-response tune he’d been testing with audiences for a few months that had quickly turned into a crowd favourite. But darker themes run beneath the song’s lighthearted exterior. Named after a smashed guardrail at the foot of a steep hill in Dartmouth, the song muses over lost chances and mortality. “You just don’t know what you’re going to get dealt,” he told the Ottawa crowd as he began the song.

Death was on Plaskett’s mind in 2014. Beloved Halifax musician Jay Smith, a member of Matt Mays’s band El Torpedo, died a year earlier, just before the Emergency’s final Scrappy Happiness show in Halifax. One of Dave Marsh’s best friends and musical protégés, Tommy “Mugak” McGachy Smith, passed away a few months later. And Marsh himself had a brush with death in late 2013, when he waited too long to treat a bout of pneumonia and wound up with blood poisoning. “Things got pretty dark for 12 hours or so,” the drummer recalls. He spent three days in the intensive care unit, leaving Plaskett terrified. “I’ve never seen someone so sick, and it put the fear in me, I’ll tell you,” the songwriter says. “All in all, it was a shit year. And a rough winter. A really, really long winter.”

That heaviness weighed on Plaskett’s next record, released in March 2015 on Kim Cooke’s new label, Pheromone Recordings. Joel Plaskett & The Park Avenue Sobriety Test, like its title track, is a meditation on the many forces in life that can conspire against you. As he sings in the opener, “Illegitimate Blues,” he can’t help but feeling kinda fucked up; even if his life seems okay on paper, he’s certainly worried about the world his son will inherit. Across 13 songs, there are laments about overdue rent, society’s obsession with technology, even government phone surveillance, and he makes the case that the little frustrations in life can add up fast.

Plaskett, of course, can blend sorrow and optimism with surgical precision, and that approach guides much of the album. “Illegitimate Blues” casually references a depression of unknown origin, but it’s a short enough song, he says, not to be taken truly seriously. The album’s unnamed leading man dwells on the past because the present is too much to deal with (“On a Dime”) and heads out the door (“Alright OK”) only to lose his phone. There’s an apology to the loved one left behind (“When I Close My Eyes”), a fight (“Credits Roll”), and, on “Captains of Industry,” a sudden change of heart. The slow-drip centrepiece was partially inspired by Naomi Klein’s 2014 book This Changes Everything, which explores the relationship between capitalism and climate change. Plaskett had started the song before reading the book, but Klein’s perspective on activism fuelled the fire. The song marks an end to the stress of the album’s first half with the recognition, Plaskett says, that everybody’s on the same team. “You realize you’re not at odds with each other; the world is at odds with you. Those pressures of living in a society with a lot of unfairness — if that weighs on your mind, it can make you an angry person.”

From there, Park Avenue digs itself out of its hole: after a moment of sober reflection (“For Your Consideration”), there’s a cover of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times,” a 160-year-old traditional folk protest song with lyrics that still resonate with Plaskett today. It serves as a positive counterpoint to “Captains of Industry”: “Hard times, come again no more.” Three tracks later, Plaskett subverts his characters’ melancholy on “Broken Heart Songs”: “I didn’t step to the mic just to tell you I’m down.” The album-closing title track deals with darkness, too, but it’s really about seizing the day. It’s an acknowledgement that bad things are bound to happen, and what matters more is recognizing it’s up to you to do something about it. “It sums up the theme,” he says. “You’re left to your own devices when you’re walking home. And you can either choose to walk through this sketchy park at midnight or walk around it, but if you wanna get home you’ve gotta deal with it. At the end of the day, you’ve gotta deal with yourself.”

The song’s name was first coined by Plaskett’s neighbour Roy Logan, who one day pointed out a smashed guardrail near two sharp turns as the musician walked home from his son’s daycare. As city workers dragged it away, Plaskett recalls, Logan said, “That’s the Park Avenue sobriety test.” Plaskett admired Logan’s subtle sense of humour; when the neighbour died a year later of cancer, just before the National Arts Centre show, his memorial was filled with laughter as guests shared his jokes and stories. Plaskett had toyed with other potential album names, including Beyond the Frame — a lyric that recurs throughout the album — as a way to acknowledge that friends can often struggle just outside of plain sight. But the memorial struck Plaskett. He wanted to give more meaning to Logan’s one-off quip — a chance to give his sense of humour a second life. Soon enough, the phrase birthed both a song and an album.

A FEW BLOCKS from Park Avenue, at New Scotland Yard, Plaskett took a new approach to making The Park Avenue Sobriety Test, recording much of it live off the floor. It’s studio as playground; just like Clayton Park was a portrait of the shredding live show of Thrush Hermit, Park Avenue captures the fun of Plaskett’s performances 16 years later. With a cast of co-conspirators 20 deep, the record comes with a great sense of fun and improvisation. Gone is the radio sheen that coated his recordings since first joining forces with Gordie Johnson for Make a Little Noise in 2005. There are warts, goofs, and mic-checks. It’s a kitchen party captured on tape.

“It wasn’t like we rehearsed and got together,” Plaskett says. “I sent some folks demos and went over the chords with a couple people here and there at different times. But a lot of it was, like, everyone showed up, we learned the song, and four hours later, usually, we had tracked it.” Using Scrappy Happiness as a teachable moment, Plaskett forced himself and his crew not to linger too much on details. In doing so, the process became easier, more relaxed. Recording “For Your Consideration” late one night, for instance, “I was like, ‘Let’s mix it right now, because I don’t know if I’ll feel the same way tomorrow.’” There are impossible-to-recreate moments, like when one guitar is off by a semi-tone during the chromatic-climb climax to “Broken Heart Songs.” You can hear Plaskett singing through a smile in the final lines that follow. “His continued pursuit of rock ’n’ roll is essentially a chase for the joy found in that kind of giddy, adolescent moment,” says Peter Elkas, who played on the song — and who insists is not personally responsible for the wrong notes.

The Emergency are on the record, and so are all their friends. “I love the space a trio creates,” Dave Marsh says, but “when someone sits in with us, it’s a cool new sensation.” In fact, it’s one for the Emergency history books: all three bassists from the band’s recording history appear, including Chris Pennell and Tim Brennan; Ian McGettigan doesn’t play, but he shows up behind both the boards and the congas. Elkas is there, as is Charles Austin, a remnant of the five-piece days, and new keyboardist John Boudreau. Mo Kenney sings backing vocals alongside Erin Costello, who plays piano on the haunting “For Your Consideration.”

“What stands out most for me is the bittersweet juxtaposition of the melancholy material and the joyous, gang-in-a-room approach to the presentation,” Elkas says. “When I first heard the rough demos, I thought the songs were too emotionally down to suit the kind of production Joel had been talking about. Once we tracked a few of the numbers as the large, harmonious group, I realized that Joel probably knew that capturing and injecting that human connection would tie party balloons to a potentially sad and lonely kid.” That’s exactly the tone that Plaskett was going for. “Some people have told me they think it’s my most melancholy record,” he says. “I don’t feel that way, because when I listen to it, I feel a lot of joy in the playing.”

While he was working on the promotion for Joel Plaskett & The Park Avenue Sobriety Test, Cooke realized that as good as the record’s name was, it was even more apt folded into an acronym: Joel Plaskett & The PAST. And it’s true: on top of the career-spanning guest list, it’s also the sound of a life’s worth of influences wrung out on tape. There’s the trad-folk passed down from his father, the hooks of Thrush Hermit, the blues-rock sensibility of the Emergency, and the solo reflection of projects like La De Da and Three. Zoom out on the album cover, and you’ll see some familiar imagery scattered around New Scotland Yard: Scrappy’s mechanical monkey, the rugs that inspired the covers of both Ashtray Rock and Three, and Rebecca Kraatz’s original artwork for In Need of Medical Attention and La De Da. The acronym may have been incidental, Cooke says, but “it all ties together very, very well.”

There is one key fixture from Plaskett’s past missing from the record — his father, Bill, who was in Australia while the ragtag crew was recording in November 2014. But his traditional influence appears in parts of Park Avenue, nowhere more so than on “Hard Times,” which Bill taught his son, and which they regularly play whenever they get a chance to share a stage. The trad-folk sound, which Plaskett has slowly embraced since inviting Bill to perform on Three, only enhances the album’s kitchen-party feel. Rather than work within the confines of the distinctly Maritime-sounding genre, though, he challenges it, projecting his own vision onto the sound. Occasionally that comes by chance. J.P. Cormier’s front-and-centre fiddle on “On a Dime,” for instance, was originally recorded to harmonize with a banjo line — one that Plaskett muted once he realized how much he loved the fiddle alone. His taste, he admits, is subjective. “It’s funny, because I love all that stuff, but it can get corny if it’s approached the wrong way,” he says. “When it feels right, it feels right. There’s no other way to say it.” Three decades after Émile Benoit scuffed his family home’s floor at a folk festival after-party, Plaskett has come to embrace the music his father raised him on. It just took him awhile to make it work the way he wanted it to.

STUBBORNNESS RUNS THROUGH Plaskett’s career. It’s something Rebecca Kraatz learned very early on in their relationship. There’s a story she’ll always remember: as they were walking down the street in Toronto soon after they met, a friend asked him what, if he wasn’t playing music, he’d do for a living. “Joel looked down, and said, ‘I don’t even want to think about that,’” Kraatz remembers. “It’s like a thread that’s pulled him all the way through to now.” He’s since executed this stubbornness in endless ways. Thrush Hermit scoffed at the major-label world; Steve Miller Band covers were cooler than conforming to expectations anyway. Concept albums are more interesting to him than radio hits. Even if it’s triple the work, he sees no reason not to make a triple record. He even avoided making traditional east-coast folk music until he was sure he wouldn’t sound corny.

In the past 25 years, this attitude has earned him an awful lot of admirers. Dave Marsh sees a little bit of Mick Jagger in his bandmate. “He’s the London School of Economics kid who decided to take control of his destiny and make sure nobody fucked with him,” he says. Early Emergency member Charles Austin, meanwhile, likes what Plaskett’s shown the world: “He’s definitely a good model of how you can be successful without being a dick. It’s inspiring.”

In documenting and nurturing the next generation of Halifax musicians, Plaskett’s even filled the shoes Sloan left behind when they packed up murderecords and moved to Toronto in the mid-’90s. Since producing Mo Kenney’s debut, he’s regularly brought her along to open for him on tour — and, most recently, invited her to play guitar in his “Emergency Deluxe” touring band, where she can be seen trading riffs with Plaskett on songs like “Come On Teacher.” “He’s been instrumental to my career thus far,” Kenney says. “It’s nice to have someone like him supporting local music. He doesn’t have to do that, but he does. . . . I still learn from him all the time. He’s kind of my mentor.”

People often ask Bill Plaskett if he’s proud of his son — and of course he is. “But I’m also in admiration of him, in a way,” he says. Joel’s success “came about through a lot of dedication and mental focus and belief in himself — all of which are qualities that I admire. And so I’m pleased as punch that he has been able to sustain [his career] and grow it.”

After booking shows at the Horseshoe Tavern and Lee’s Palace in Toronto for more than two decades, Jeff Cohen has seen the biggest bands Canada has to offer. When Plaskett plays Toronto, the promoter can often be seen just off the side of the stage with a huge grin. He minces no words about Plaskett’s performances: “I think the Emergency, with no offence to Blue Rodeo and other bands here, are the best rock ’n’ roll band in Canada.” Kind words aren’t confined within Canadian borders, either. Clyde Lieberman, who discovered Plaskett in 1993 — now an executive in charge of music for shows like The Voice — calls him his “favourite of any artist with whom I have had the pleasure of working, period.”

Plaskett’s accolades continue to grow, too. The East Coast Music Awards keep stacking up, now two dozen high. In 2011, in the early days of streaming music, he became the first artist to reach a million on-demand plays on CBC’s Radio 3 website. And three years later, he was handed Radio 3’s Lifetime Achievement Award, for being a “true pioneer of the Canadian music scene.” It was a vote of confidence, 21 years after he signed his first publishing deal with BMG as a scrawny teenager, in his commitment and contribution to the country’s musical tradition.

Contrast that with the award he received from the readers of Halifax alt-weekly the Coast in 2002, on the heels of Down at the Khyber: Most Likely to Move to Toronto. [16] But rather than give into the pressure to move to Ontario, Plaskett continued to work in defiance of geography. After more than two decades of lessons learned and hype unheeded, Plaskett has largely opted not to follow music-industry expectations. “One of the things I often tell people who are from small places is ‘You’ve got to move away from there,’” says Allison Outhit, the former Halifax musician who’s now an executive at FACTOR in Toronto. “I probably would have given Joel exactly the same advice if I met him now, if he was a young performer: ‘You have to get out of Nova Scotia, because there’s just literally not enough people there for you to build your career.’ Of course, I would have been wrong.”

Plaskett took his career into his own hands, becoming an archetypal road warrior and building up a fan base that’s as dedicated to him as he is to them. In doing so, he’s never had to compromise in his music or his mailing address. “There was always enough money in it to make it worth leaving the house,” he says. He calls himself lucky for coming up in the right scene at the right time, but when the hype on Halifax faded, he didn’t give up on his dream. “Most people I know have some other idea of what they might want to do,” he says. “To be honest, I have no backup plan. I have nothing else I could do. I’ve lived in a suspended adolescence since I was 18.”

Plaskett is a big fan of regionalism — the celebration of local character, culture, and stories. That, to him, is true patriot love. And so he has fashioned himself as the regionalist-in-chief of a lovely, if regularly overlooked, corner of Canada. He does this with a healthy skepticism of how others expect him to behave: “Halifax, Nova Scotia, is the land of the free,” he sings on Park Avenue’s “Alright OK,” “I don’t care what the anthem says.” He doesn’t need to be in Toronto, Montreal, New York, or Los Angeles to make music. He makes it on his own terms, crafting crucial Canadiana, roping in eager listeners regardless of where they’re from with love letters to the east coast. His music, then, is a rare pop-culture phenomenon: a stubborn, acclaimed, against-the-grain take on the notion that you need to leave home to succeed in life. Why go away when you can go nowhere with him?

(16) — He shared the award with Buck 65, who did, in fact, eventually move to Toronto — despite telling the Coast that he’d rather relocate to Madagascar than the Ontario capital.