Joel Jacques is a guitarist for Ottawa band the Murder Plans. The band’s latest album is entitled Good Omens.
Your song Ghost Story has the first guest appearance by the National Research Council Official Time Signal I’ve ever heard on an album. (“The beginning of the long dash followed by 10 seconds of silence marks 1 eastern standard time.”) How did that come about?
(Singer) Connor McGuire and I are avid CBC listeners and we’ve converted Mike as well. So there’s certain things that just kinda stick in your brain, and that gets thrown at you every day at 1. I don’t know why, but it worked. It’s a little bit of Canadiana, I guess.
You’re playing the Elmdale House Tavern on April 2 with the Lowest Of The Low. Are you old enough to remember their album, Shakespeare My Butt?
Ah, no actually. I had to be brought up to speed on this. We were at Indie Week in Toronto in the fall promoting the album, and we went to one of these industry panels and Ron Hawkins was part of that panel. I’m sitting in the back with Connor and he’s all excited and he’s not the kind of guy to get that excited about meeting people, but he was, “Do you know who Ron Hawkins is? He’s from the Lowest Of The Low!” I guess he grew up listening to them, and I had to kind of force him to go up and talk to him after because he was kind of star-struck, but they hit it off. Ron listened to our album, got in touch with us, we did a show with him a couple of months ago at the Elmdale. He performs solo more often than not. And he’s a really neat guy, actually, and he invited us to be part of this Lowest Of The Low reunion tour.
You’ve played the Elmdale a lot. What are your impressions of it?
Well, the weird pickled herring and the sausages, I’m not into that, but I know some people are. It still kind of feels like a ’50s legion kind of a thing going on. We’ve played at all the venues in town over the years and for whatever reason, it just always connects at the Elmdale. It’s just one of those nebulous things, but for whatever reason the Elmdale and us just work.
