Joel Plaskett may be Canadian rock royalty, but for the next week, the 35-year-old singer and songwriter is just one of the boys when he rejoins his old band Thrush Hermit on a celebratory tour, including a stop at the Capital Music Hall on Thursday.
It's been 10 years since the Juno Award-winning Plaskett played regularly with Rob Benvie, Ian McGettigan and Cliff Gibb in Thrush Hermit, the Halifax-based band that in the 1990s, would rival Sloan as the band on the East Coast scene.
Alas, that didn't happen, if at all, until long after the band disbanded in 2000.
Perhaps they were ahead of their time because in the decade since they disbanded, a whole new audience has emerged for Thrush Hermit's contrapuntal rock and roll, which owes much of its alternative jam sound to Black Sabbath and Husker Du.
"The music's a lot louder and heavier than I remembered," Plaskett laughs during final rehearsals for the tour which winds up on March 27 at Toronto's Lee's Palace.
"It's like a working vacation," Plaskett jokes about playing with the band. "The old songs came back to me so fast I didn't need lyric sheets. But it holds up alright. After 10 years, we sound mightier than ever."
Childhood friends, Plaskett, Benvie and McGettigan and original drummer Michael Catano were barely pimply teens obsessed with grunge and punk when they decided to become a band, for the same reasons that teens get into bands. Something to do. But there was real chemistry in the mix of players, and their first EP Smart Bomb caught the attention of Elektra Entertainment, which signed them in 1996 and released their first power-pop album Sweet Homewrecker a year later.
By the time they'd released their final album Clayton Park in 1999, the foursome had matured into a progressive jam band led by Plaskett.
"I've been friends with these guys since I was 14 in Grade 8. We were joined at the hip," Plaskett says.
"The Hermit was about edgy music. We felt like we were an important band."
Despite a few ups and downs, Thrush Hermit was surprisingly successful throughout the Maritimes. The only reason they broke up was because Plaskett, who by the end had become the band's leader, wanted to follow his own widening musical boundaries.
"We went out on a high with Clayton Park," he says proudly.
Since the band's breakup, Plaskett's become one of Canada's most prolific, and successful rock songwriters. He and his band were nominated for Junos and won East Coast Music Awards for his first album Truthfully, Truthfully, winning in 2006 for his second album La De Da. In 2008, the band broke a record at the East Coast Music Awards when they won in six categories. In 2009, Plaskett released Three, a three-disc set of 27-songs that was nominated for a Polaris Prize. Plaskett opened for Paul McCartney at Halifax Common.
These days, Plaskett's solo career is red-hot. He opens for Barenaked Ladies's spring tour, then joins Peter Elkas for a series of concerts across Canada. Then it's off to the U.K. in May. He's also writing new songs for Sarah Slean.
Despite a hectic schedule, playing with his old friends is something he wanted to do. They recently made a new video for In The Morning, are rereleasing their complete discography in a box set on Plaskett's New Scotland Records label. The band is also making a documentary video of the tour.
