A new Joel Plaskett album out there as a lighthouse guiding wanderers through the stormy weather: The Park Avenue Sobriety Test

A new Joel Plaskett album out there as a lighthouse guiding wanderers through the stormy weather: The Park Avenue Sobriety Test Songs with a thesis, songs that don't settle for the sound, but carry on beyond harmony and want to create social balance. Such songs are those that compose Joel Plaskett's new album.

About the album name, on his website, Joel goes something like this: "Is it the name of a band? A metaphor? A Dartmouth rite of passage? An acronym? It’s a bit of all those, and a bit of a mystery too."

The song we'd like to comment is a little piece called 'Broke'. There are a few differences in the first stanza, between the studio version ("Johnny's in the basement [...] thinking to himself I guess I gotta settle for less") and the live song he interpreted for The Strombo Show ("Johnny's in the basement [...] thinking to himself he's happy just to settle for less"). That changes things a bit, but anyway, per total, the song has three motifs that revolve around one big theme. The theme is money as the eye of the devil, the object that alienates us and separates us from our true nature. The motifs are paper chasing (a major waste of time), drug abuse (monetary insatisfaction leads to drug abuse), debts and the lack of money, which in the latter part of the second verse leads to a trivial life ("If you got a loonie, he'll tell you the dirtiest joke"), and in the third verse leads to the build up of stress and the spiritual rupture between human beings.

Joel's resolution?! Absolutely brilliant. Here's the verse:

"I'm broke, I know I'm broke But I'm not broken"

P.S.: Yes, yes, we got the album name all wrong on our home page, we'll fix that... ;)