“A Light in the Attic” is named for the light that combining his artistic work and activism has brought into his life, he said. Coming to British Columbia to help stop climate change has propelled him back to music.
“It was a really, really tough chapter of my life.”īut sitting at a piano with a view of the Pacific Ocean, Staats looked confident and happy. “It dampened my confidence in my music,” he said. In 2019, he spent six months in a recovery centre to overcome cocaine and alcohol addictions. Pressure from the label, contract litigation with a former producer and deepening social anxiety pushed Staats down a dark path, he said. “I was in this love-hate relationship with music for a while.” “They wanted me to record the song over and over” to monetize it, he said. He had a meteoric rise to fame after he won Bell Media’s musical competition show “The Launch” in 2018 and his single “The Lucky Ones” became an award-winning hit.īut being snapped up to work with music moguls at Big Machine Records - which also represented stars such as Taylor Swift - put a strain on the singer. The gentle urgency of “Deadman” also reflects Staats’ difficult journey back to the stage. “When I sing ‘Give me back my love,’ I am singing about learning to love my Indigenous culture and myself.” The song is about the culture that was stolen from him, Staats said. The video for “Deadman,” filmed at the site of the Mohawk residential school, bursts with “land back” protest images. “It was one of the best shows I’ve ever played in my life.” But the furor at the Wet’suwet’en territory ignited a fire that infused his music, he said. He hadn’t slept and it was painful to walk. Sainte-Marie’s makeup artist struggled to conceal his bruises, Staats said.
“I was simply there to protect the land … I was singing.”Īfter two nights in jail, Staats opened for Oscar-winning Canadian singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie in London, Ont. He felt dazed, unable to breathe and was bleeding uncontrollably from his ear, he said. The Juno-nominated Mohawk artist from Brantford, Ont., who is to perform May 7 in the Toronto Beyond Our Roots Festival, has been juggling his music with protesting the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline stretching across the Wet’suwet’en First Nation’s traditional lands.ĭark hair cascading down his back, the 33-year-old lowered his gaze as he described the trauma of his arrest. VICTORIA Singer-songwriter Logan Staats was performing at the Wet’suwet’en blockade in northern British Columbia in November when a swarm of RCMP officers grabbed his hair, slammed his face on the ground, jumped on top of him and arrested him, he said.
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