Joel Plaskett is a nice guy. A really nice guy. Pretty much everyone who’s met him will tell you this, but it’s obvious onstage too. His father Bill, who accompanied the younger Plaskett onstage Massey Hall last Saturday, also seems like a stand-up fellow. If someone’s ever cursed the Emergency, the Haligonian singer-songwriter’s frequent backing band, I didn’t hear about it. (He brought them to the show as well, even though they were only involved in one of his new album’s 27 tracks.) And if I told you that his wife, the talented and lovely artist Rebecca Kraatz, was in the audience singing along with us to a tune about their cat, you might start thinking Plaskett’s Halifax is not an actual place but the sugary musical fantasy of some twee Scandinavian boy-man.

Yet there’s nothing forced or calculated in what he does. Plaskett just writes good songs (indie rock with the Emergency, poppy folk when he’s alone) more frequently and consistently than most other songwriter in Canada. His stabs at formalism are equally straight-forward. If he records a pseudo-autobiographical concept album about a teenage love triangle (2007's Ashtray Rock), the lyrics will be intentionally adolescent; if he makes a triple LP it’ll be divided into three distinct movements and feature titles like “Run, Run, Run” and be called, well, Three. The results don’t always work (lots of people hated those Ashtray Rock lyrics), but they do share a certain attitude. It was these most recent discs that brought him to Massey Hall.

The line-up alongside Plaskett shifted throughout the night. Most commonly it was a three-piece with the Emergency on bass and drums, but he’d also bring on his father or friends like Rose Cousins and Ana Egein (the female vocalists from his new album) or Peter Elkas  various combinations. The spirit of experimentation extended to the songs themselves. The bulk of those were taken from Three, but Plaskett filled out his setlist with both oddities (the minute-long “Ashtray Rock”) and heretical standards. He boldly performed some of his biggest hits solo with an acoustic guitar, and if not all the change was for the better (“True Patriot Love” really does need that full band) it was at least interesting. He even got improvisational at one point, ad-libbing an amusing freestyle about White Fang (the earless, deathless stray cat he and Kraatz adopted some years ago).



The musicians onstage all had a decade or more of experience, and it was obvious. During one song Dave Marsh’s bass drum broke; he nonchalantly picked up a maraca to simulate the sound until it was fixed. For electro-tinged “Fashionable People,” Plaskett sat down at the kit himself while singing falsetto hooks so inhumanly perfect they could’ve been AutoTuned. And he has the charisma to match that extreme competence: affable and funny whether the song is plodding (“Run, Run, Run”) or captivating (the elegiac “Sailor’s Eyes”), seemingly friendly with everyone in the audience at once. (He’s also so lanky and unlined that someone who's only seen Plaskett at his shows might believe he’s aging backwards.)

Around three hours later, the encore concluded with “On & On & On,” which could pass for one of Neil Young’s epics if there wasn’t an entire verse hyping up Shelagh Rogers. It’s a shaggy dog, but one that eventually gets somewhere. After many, many lines describing the passage of time and friends and a few absurd tangents, Plaskett and friends croon: “Ooh, my little White Fang, / Sleeping all day, sleeping all night / Sleeping on the couch, making it white.” And soon all of Massey Hall sings along, celebrating an old cat with no ears or noticeable activity but who’s still there back home, not dead, not yet. It was nice.