BONNYVILLE - Speaking from his home in Edmonton, Plume started by saying “There's nothing I can say that isn't a cliche, but it is a thrill to be nominated. You always hear these jerks say that, but it is cool to have a tip of the hat win or lose – and in my case it has been lose every time, but that's okay.”
Over the last 30 or so years, Plume has been nominated for Country Music Alberta (CMAB) Awards at least a half dozen times, the exact number he doesn’t seem to recall.
Nominated as Roots Artist of the Year for this year’s CMAB awards, Plume described “The whole roots artists thing” as “where you put the acts who have been influenced as much by the Clash than they have by Hank Williams or Garth Brooks – It's a wide swath musically.”
And he doesn’t dispute that the category is where his music belongs.
“The more you listen to music, the more influences you have, and the more influences you have, the harder it is to detect what it actually is because you become such a hybrid of all these different styles of music,” he said.
And for the last three decades, all of the new places and new experiences that Plume has had, have found their way into the music he has created – including his time in Bonnyville.
Plume easily recalls arriving in Bonnyville in mid-August of 1985, when he was just 17 years old with his mom and brother, moving from Moncton, New Brunswick.
“It was interesting because Bonnyville is where I became a musician. In New Brunswick, I was still playing hockey... but in my last three or four months before we moved out here, I bought my first guitar.”
By December of that year, Plume would be carrying out his first musical gig in the student area alongside current band mate Ernie Basiliadis, at Bonnyville Centralized High School (BCHS).
"That was when the music really took ahold of me and that's when I decided that I would really like to try to do that for my living, for my lifetime,” he recalled.
During Plume’s two years of high school at BCHS, he would begin coming into his own and forming long lasting connections, something he wasn’t able to do previously – a side effect from moving regularly.
“That was the first year where I knew I wasn't leaving anywhere anytime soon. It was the first year since Grade 7 where it was like having come home, because of that I still feel Bonnyville is home,” he said. "But I never put my finger on it until decades later.”
It wasn’t long until Plume would hit the road again, this time with a guitar and a group of musicians.
“I hit the road, two weeks after high school and then I was in a different town every week. For what felt like, almost the next decade and a half,” he said.
Having lived in Texas, Toronto, Tennessee and now in Edmonton, with many stops in between, travelling and living in new places is something Plume is unlikely to give up.
“The more places you travel, the more you realize that everybody is really all the same, as much as TV and maybe some political hacks will make you feel that the other side are just pure evil. We're all closer to being the same than we sometimes probably give each other credit for,” he said.
Plume also attributes is relocations as a way to keep his artistic abilities sharp. Being an outsider and staying on the periphery of things develops the songwriter’s eye and helps keep an open mind, he says.
Reciting a popular quote from Mark Twain, Plume said, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts."
And while Plume, travels far beyond this little corner of the world, he regularly returns to a place he considers home to perform and “cut laps along Main Street.”
Most recently, he performed for a local audience at the Bonnyville Legion in December.
Soon, Plume will head to the CMAB awards after being nominated in the same category as another Bonnyville musician, Clayton Bellamy. This Plume chalks up to dumb luck.
“I met Clay when he was probably 12 years old back in like 1989,” he recalls. “I had just been fired from my second band and I had moved back to Bonnyville and I took a job teaching guitar lessons at Panich Music in town.”
And while Plume didn’t teach Bellamy to play guitar, he notes that he’s proud to see other Bonnyville area musicians nominated alongside him at the CMABs, speaking to both Bellamy and Flat Lake’s Brett Kissel.
The CMAB awards will be held in Red Deer on March 19-20.
