Scrappy Happiness!

For CBC’s 2009 Song Quest, Joel Plaskett wrote, recorded and mastered a song about the Cabot Trail, “On the Rail”, in just ten days. The thrill of this whirlwind experience inspired Plaskett’s most recent album, Scrappy Happiness, recorded in only ten weeks. “ Why do we always have to wait six months for things to come out?” asks Plaskett. “I think that pointed me towards this project – that idea of having things not take a long time to go from the studio to the public”. Leading up to Scrappy’s March 27 th release, he and The Emergency recorded and produced a new song each week to be played on CBC Radio 2 and 3 every Tuesday. Happiness should be Scrappy… The name “Scrappy Happiness” relates to the rapid song-a-week manner in which the album was produced. “The idea is that if you let go of it, it might be scrappy, but as long as there’s some happiness involved, it’ll be good,” Plaskett muses. He explains that one of the record’s overarching themes is valuing the imperfections in th...