Excerpted from Nowhere With You: The East Coast Anthems of Joel Plaskett, The Emergency and Thrush Hermit© 2016 by Josh O'Kane. All rights reserved. Published by ECW Press Ltd.
By 2003, Chris Murphy and the rest of Sloan had been living in Toronto for more than half a decade. It’d been years since Joel Plaskett had been able to regularly hang out with Murphy, his old friend, neighbour, and early career champion. Plaskett was visiting California early that year, and as it happened, Sloan was there, too, recording with Tom Rothrock, a go-to producer for Beck and Elliott Smith. So he and Murphy got together and took a drive out to Joshua Tree National Park, showing each other demos that would eventually turn into Action Pact and Truthfully, Truthfully.
One of the unfinished songs Murphy played had a catchy, repetitive chorus: “I love this town,” over and over again. It was Plaskett’s favourite, Murphy says, and the one he kept asking to hear.
When Plaskett released his second solo album, La De Da, in 2005, it was anchored, in part, by an ode to Halifax called “Love This Town.” Plaskett hardly remembers Murphy’s song of the same name. “You don’t really know, when you’re writing songs, where you’re channelling stuff from,” he says. “I’m not saying I stole the song. I didn’t. I wrote it. I think of that song as a shameless Al Tuck ripoff, to be honest.”
Plaskett doesn’t hide the influence Tuck and Murphy have had on his songwriting. “The mark of the Halifax writing and music scene that I’ve always loved and wanted to be a part of — and I think I’ve carried on that tradition — is this mix of humour and melancholy and pointedness.” The tradition, he says, recognizes the unique attitude of Halifax, and all of the Maritimes, including the region’s inherent outsider perspective, like Tuck did on songs like the pop-explosion takedown “One Day the Warner.” “There’s certain traits that I saw in writers, like Al, from P.E.I., who can mix humour and sadness. Chris had that with ‘I Am the Cancer.’ I’m not saying every song did it, but there was a general vein through the music that I really like. You write for your peers, you write for your town, and you take it seriously, but you don’t take it so seriously.”
Murphy was never happy with his original track, and it didn’t make the cut for Action Pact. Only years later did it emerge, heavily rewritten, as “All I Am Is All You’re Not,” on 2008’s Parallel Play. But the ever-sarcastic musician relished the unintended intellectual property theft, using it as an excuse to throw shade at his old scenemate. “Whenever I saw him next,” he says, “I was like, ‘Hey, I like your song. And I liked it even better when it was my song.’”
Murphy’s jabs, though, are in jest. He does love Plaskett’s song. “His story’s way better. I had a dilemma about what town to be writing about: Halifax or Toronto? I love what about Toronto — the mayor?” (Rob Ford was Toronto’s mayor at the time of this interview.) “I feel like I’m just barging in on history, because I feel like that song will go down as one of the great songs. And I had a small part in it.”
Chris Murphy (left) and Joel Plaskett in Joshua Tree National Park, Calif. (from Joel Plaskett's personal collection)
Love This Town is a song perfectly befitting Plaskett’s career, with a backstory perfectly befitting the song. It’s a collection of stories and homages from home and abroad — from Tuck’s apartment burning down, to a hat-tip to Springsteen’s “Bobby Jean,” to the long drive home from Ontario — all wrapped into a love letter to Halifax. With its balanced blend of fun and sorrow, it’s a road-show anchor and a hometown anthem. The song even takes a dig at the musicians Plaskett has watched leave Nova Scotia, which, ironically, includes Sloan. As Halifax music critic Stephen Cooke says, “It validates his decision to stay in such a beautiful way.” The song resonates with people of all stripes: in 2015, longtime federal cabinet minister Peter MacKay, a Nova Scotian, quoted it when he announced he was leaving politics. Not only does “Love This Town” exemplify everything that’s helped Plaskett build a successful career without having to leave home, it spreads that home’s gospel from coast to coast to coast. “People celebrate it,” he once said. “They have their own experiences that they relate it to. It takes on a life of its own.”
In my case, Plaskett’s music was the soundtrack for a far-too-frequent Maritime pilgrimage: to Toronto. Songs like “Love This Town” kept my neck craned eastward as I landed at Pearson, headed for a new job. Ashtray Rock felt like a rock opera set in my own backyard, except that backyard was now 1,300 kilometres away. Three became a breakup album, for both a girl and a place; the record is, after all, about leaving someone and somewhere behind.
But with enough listens — and, for a while, a mended relationship — Three’s whole picture became clearer. It’s about coming home, too, and embracing what you’ve got and where you’re from. Soon I was seeing bigger pictures across Plaskett’s whole catalogue — crystal-clear portraits of life on the east coast, of growing up there, of leaving there, of coming home. The ghost of geography infects his oeuvre, from its friendly barroom tales and harbour-town stories to too-familiar ruminations over one’s place in the world.
--taken from: CBC Music (read more here)
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