Stagger and Swoon

Besides my beloved Neil, Canada has contributed some real gems to the music world in the past 30 years. Joni Mitchell, Sloan, Bachman-Turner Overdrive just to name a few. No doubt you've heard you've heard of these folks, and you probably own some of their records (c'mon, you love "Takin' Care of Business"...). But I bet you've never heard of Joel Plaskett, and Sally - in a country of musical giants, he stands on their shoulders.

I remember as clear as Pepsi Clear the first time I heard Joel Plaskett: it was in the summer of 2003 and I was at a BBQ at my good friends Brent and Amy's place in Bellingham. That summer was a pretty epic one for me. I had just lost the first girl I had truly loved; I worked graveyard shift at a shit job that spilled me everynight in a heap of hunger and exhaustion into a booth at the all-night diner the Ranch Room, reading Dave Eggers and eating grilled cheese sandwhiches until daybreak. At the conclusion of summer, I'd be moving to Chicago, leaving all that behind.

My friend Brent had been telling me about Joel Plaskett for awhile, but it hadn't quite stuck. But at his BBQ, he put on "Down at the Kybhar", Joel's second solo record. I don't remember paying all that close of attention to the record; I was in a social mood and talking up Dave Crider about Chicago and what bars to go to (for the record: Delilah's and the Empty Bottle). But it was with the first notes of the album's closing track, "Light Of The Moon" that I finally perked up and took notice. It was one of those "what the fuck is this?!!!" moments. From across the lawn, I asked Brent who this was. "It's Joel Plaskett", he said.

The song is a monster, beginning with a quiet, haunting acoustic guitar and Joel's piercing croon, and then erupts into a volcano of distortion and drum fills as epic and powerful as any song I've ever heard. It was everything about music that I loved: fragile, beautiful, haunting, and it, well...kicked serious ass. And as I soon came to find out, it concluded an entire album full of these kind of moments.

The "Down at the Kyhber" album completely changed how I thought about and played music. It's fair to put it in the terms of Before Joel and After Joel. Here was a guy with a voice a lot like mine - kind of nasally and whiney, writing songs I wished to fucking hell I wrote. I bonded it with it immediatly, like a girl you fall in love with the moment you see her and it seems like you've known her forever and that you're life was just some strange dream before.

And what was also so great is that he was completely unknown. I had never seen his picture in a magazine or seen one of his music videos. It was one of those rare, almost unheard of moments when you connect with the music, purely on the music's merit. You aren't corrupted with how cool they looked in that Spin spread or buzz you'd heard from hipster friends. In this ultra saturized times we live in, I don't think this happens anymore. You can never quite seperate the look from the music, even subconsciously (the Strokes music is pretty good, but goddamn don't they always look so cool doing it!).

Now perhaps it's not an accident that that day at the BBQ I got the most drunk I'd ever been and have been since, drinking the majority of a bottle of Beam I had brought as a gift, and ended up passing out in my car...at about 6 in the evening. Maybe that rosey blur adds to the nostalgia of the day and of the recollection hearing Joel Plaskett for the first time, I don't know. But, all cheesiness and cliche aside - and among many mornings and evenings I've long since forgotten - it's a day I'll never forget.

And now, 3 years later, Joel's music, and especially "Light of the Moon", has reached that pinnacle in my conscious that seperates it from being just a piece of music I love, but one that frames a moment in time when everything was changing, and nothing would ever be the same. It became the soundtrack for the end of one part of my life, and the beginning of another.

After all this time, I had never seen Joel live. He's very well regarded in Canada, but has absolutely no presence in the US, so he never tours stateside. But about a month ago, he came to Chicago, to the Empty Bottle, on a Sunday night. And it maybe wasn't an accident that I was going through a extremely rough spot at the time, and perhaps it was Joel coming through to save me again.

There was no one at the show; maybe 20 people. Maybe. I sat on the risers to the left of the stage and took in the moment. I was a fucking wreck before I went to the show, but seeing Joel sing those songs I'd loved so much for so long and that meant so much to me, was something I just can't put into words. He was playing for me; it didn't matter that there was no one there. And in fact, it only encouraged me to treat it like my own private concert, yelling out song requests to which Joel kindly obligied.

I tried not to sound like a tool yelling out songs, but i didn't care. After playing the two songs I kindly requested, I was still waiting for "Light of the Moon" when he ended his set. It went something like this:

Joel: Thanks, goodnig...
Kegan: Light of the Moon!

Joel kind of laughed and said, "alright, we can do one more". I mean, you have to imagine, there was no one there. The few that were there were on their way out, no one was calling for an encore, except my dumbass. So he played "Light of the Moon", for me and probably me alone, and it was transcendiary.