Description
Label Review.
2019 album. Folk. Also available on CD.
Our Overview.
Following 2017’s critically acclaimed ‘Love Versus’ album, Leeroy Stagger has emerged with ‘Strange Path’, his most ambitious and philosophical creation yet an album on which he has surrounded himself with some of the best players in the business.
To say that Canadian musician Leeroy Stagger’s life journey has followed a strange path would be a bit of an understatement. 17 years as a singer-songwriter and 10 years sober, with two kids, a home in Lethbridge, Alberta, and a world-class recording studio to go with it, he’s far removed from the hard-living twenty-something who started on this musical path.
The name Strange Path applies as much to Leeroy’s unexpected route from the British Columbia punk scene to southern-Alberta singer songwriter as it does to the album’s own evolution. Following from 2017’s Love Versus, itself a creative re-emergence after a years-long fog of anxiety and depression, Strange Path is the end result of a triple-album’s worth of scrapped demos, and a spirit-reviving retreat inwards. It’s also Stagger’s most ambitious and philosophical creation yet, a veritable self-help book pulled from a lifetime of struggling towards the light and brimming with the hard-won joy at the heart of his recent renaissance. It’s an album full of sharp hooks and sharper insight, and the first single “Strange Attractor”’ rides that line right to the end.
“Nothing is permanent when you really stop and think,” says Leeroy. “The home we live in, the car we drive, the children we raise, the art we make and the skin that we’re in. It’s not forever, it’s barely real, and that’s ok to me because I’ve been shown the truth of it all. In seeing that it’s not that big of a deal, this has shown me how beautiful it all is. It’s precious, impermanent and beautiful. “Strange Attractor”’ is about the unseen nature of impermanence and the sacredness of the life we live.”
In making ‘Strange Path’, Stagger surrounded himself with some of the best players in the business, including drummer Pete Thomas (Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Elliot Smith, Los Lobos), longtime collaborator Tyson Maiko, Paul Rigby (Neko Case, Garth Hudson, Jakob Dylan), Ryland Moranz and Michael Ayotte. The album was mixed by five time Grammy winner Ryan Freeland (Ray Lamontagne, Bonnie Raitt, Rodney Crowell) Brad Barr of The Barr Brothers shared producer’s chair with Leeroy on four of the eleven tracks.