Joel Plaskett playing the Capitol Theatre

Culture Factory in partnership with St. Clair College are pleased to present The Joel Plaskett Emergency Saturday August 25th at the Capitol Theatre in Chatham. The Joel Plaskett Emergency is part of Culture Factory’s Indie Weekend, a two-day event that will feature multiple music showcases throughout downtown Chatham. Musicians from both Chatham and the surrounding areas of Windsor, London, Detroit and Toronto will be performing at the event.

Tickets to The Joel Plaskett Emergency show will be available for $30 (including fees). An Indie Weekend festival wristbands that give its holder access to all shows during Indie Weekend including The Joel Plaskett Emergency will be available for $40. Tickets will be on sale May 16th and will be available at the Box Office or online at www.culturefactory.ca.

Joel Plaskett

It’s been a manic few months for Joel Plaskett, and anybody who’s been following along already knows the reason why. Out of the doldrums of another long Canadian winter, Joel and The Emergency (Dave Marsh and Chris Pennell) have been working round the clock, sending weekly volleys to fight off the seasonal blues: a brand new song – recorded, mixed, mastered, and released – every single week for the past ten weeks, accompanied by snippets of video documenting the process in-studio. It has been an epic undertaking, which now comes together in the physical release of Scrappy Happiness on cd and vinyl.

Not that Plaskett is any stranger to monumental endeavors: his last trip into the studio yielded the triple triumph, Three, for which he received a Juno Award and a Polaris Prize nomination. Scrappy Happiness is an eclectic display of Plaskett’s continued songwriting prowess and playful lyricism. While many of the songs tap bittersweet emotions hidden in the fuzzy details of the past, it is the present where this record resides. It is a fascinating experiment, which pays homage to an older mode of record production while forging ahead to new ways of engaging listeners.

But none of this would matter if it weren’t also, in the end, another compelling record from one of Canada’s leading musical voices.