Last Sunday, one of Halifax's favourite sons took a trip down to Sydney, picked up the Rock Recording of the Year prize for 2004's Truthfully Truthfully at the East Coast Music Awards, and took to the stage to pay tribute to his town by playing, appropriately enough, Love This Town.

Choosing that final track from his new solo album, La De Da, was a smart move. Had he played one of the rawer songs off the top of the disc, it might have rubbed a few people the wrong way.

It's not that Plaskett isn't a proud Haligonian; he just knew he needed to get away to take the next step in his career. Not to flee for good, like Sloan and so many others who came up alongside his former band, Thrush Hermit, in Halifax's burgeoning 1990s indie scene. Just to take a really long road trip.

The easiest thing for the 29-year-old would have been to follow up last year's success, including a well-received opening slot on the Tragically Hip's national tour, by heading back into the studio with his band, the Joel Plaskett Emergency, and cranking out more of the agreeable folk-rock that allowed him to build momentum over his first three post-Hermit albums. Instead, he packed up his van, drove eight days, and recorded a solo acoustic album at the Arizona home of Bob Hoag -- an eager fan who volunteered the use of his recording studio, not to mention a place to crash.

"From a business point of view, it may not have been the smartest thing to do or the best way to spend my time and energy," Plaskett says over the phone, home before a cross-country tour this spring. "But so much of creativity comes from recharging your batteries in different ways."

Rather than coming equipped with ready-made songs and a concrete plan, Plaskett did his best to fly by the seat of his pants. Songs were written (or at least fleshed out) on the road down, and often in the studio itself, and lyrics took on a newly introspective tone.

"A lot of the songs are coloured by the trip itself," he says. "The lyrical spin on it, I guess, is about the distance that I placed between myself and my home in Halifax-Dartmouth."

That's particularly true on the first three tracks, in which Plaskett seems relieved to be looking in the rearview mirror. "Someone whispered in my ear, 'it's not like it was before,' " he sings on Absentminded Melody. "I don't know what happened here - I guess we just got bored."

It's a conscious effort to bid farewell to the Halifax of old - the one that was fleetingly the darling of the national music press - rather than get caught up in nostalgia. "I think the classiest way to get older is just to accept it and actually turn it to your advantage," he says. "That's what I've been trying to do ... acknowledge the nostalgia and enjoy it and use it for artistic purposes, but not wallow in it to the point you can't get anything done."

Early on, it seems the album is still in danger of falling into that trap - having set out to do something different, Plaskett still can't get Halifax out of his mind, and the music doesn't seem a huge leap from his past work. But on the fourth track, Lying on a Beach, the gambit begins to pay off. As though a weight has been lifted from his shoulders, he turns out a lament for the information age's working man that sounds very little like anything he'srecorded before.

As with several of La De Da's other tracks, Plaskett had been kicking around ,i>Lying On a Beach,/i> for years (in this case, dating back to days spent working in the Nova Scotia Archives). But he couldn't make it work until he got out of his normal routine.

Similarly ambitious departures pay off equally well on Television Set and Nina and Albert, the latter suggesting a bit of Americana picked up south of the border. But it's on Non-Believer