Leeroy Stagger - Strange Path (2019)

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 nice recording studio to go with it, he’s far removed from the hard-living twenty-something who started on this musical path.
On September 13th, releases his new album with an accompanying book, ‘Strange Path’, which comes out on True North Records. And today marks the release of the video for the glam-rock blissed out first single, ‘Strange Attractor’ which you can watch below. Directed by Brock Davis Mitchell, the video draws inspiration from films like ‘The Favourite’ and ‘Marie Antoinette’ and weaves an experimental narrative with shocking bursts of colour.

The name ‘Strange Path’ applies as much to Leeroy’s unexpected route from the BC 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, the record is described as “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 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.”

“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.”

Musicians on the new record include 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 Grammy winner Ryan Freeland (Ray LaMontagne, Bonnie Raitt, Rodney Crowell) and Brad Barr of The Barr Brothers shared producer’s chair with Leeroy on four of the eleven tracks.