Mohawk singer-songwriter Logan Staats has recently unveiled his A Light In The Attic via Red Music Rising.
“This album is the soundtrack to picking yourself up, and dusting yourself off,” says Staats. “There is sweet grass and tobacco in every chord, there is sage and cedar in every falsetto, every song is my medicine.”
To Staats, music is a healing salve, contemplatively composed and offered to listeners in need of comfort. Since returning home, Staats has been able to create music authentically again, reclaiming his sound through honest storytelling and unvarnished, sometimes painful reflection.
The songs on A Light in the Attic represent the sparks of an emboldening journey. Staats sings of reconciliation, recovery from addiction, surviving intergenerational trauma, and of convalescence after heartbreak.
Staats’ love of home is at the heart of A Light in the Attic. An evocative testament to rock’s cathartic spirit, the album was recorded with borrowed microphones at Staats’ apartment, Six Nations recording studio Jukasa, and downtown Brantford’s Sanderson Centre for the Performing Arts, which was entirely empty due to pandemic-related lockdown measures.
“My nation and my community are in every chord I play and every note I sing,” says Staats. “They’ve saved me.”
Counting musical icon Buffy Sainte-Marie, for whom Staats has opened, among his mentors, Staats wants to pay forward the guidance he’s received from his own community by connecting with Indigenous youth through music. He frequently leads workshops and visits local schools.
“I want them to know there’s a reason to keep going,” he says.
A Light in the Attic is proof of that reason. Says Staats, “there is a way out of the dark.”