Off The Crooked Path | Leeroy Stagger isn’t faking anything on his stomping new disc Everything Is Real.
DETAILS
LEEROY STAGGER
w/ The Wheat Pool and Carrie Catherine. Haven Social Club (15120A Stony Plain Rd). Thu, Jun. 11 (8pm) Tickets: $12 at the door.
Leeroy Stagger has reason to be proud. His fifth full-length release, Everything Is Real, came out in May and has been gaining him positive attention from critics — plus he’s overcome some significant personal adversity to make it his best record yet.
Stagger released his debut EP, Six Tales of Danger, in 2002 and has been making music ever since. He’s opened for the likes of Modest Mouse and The Pixies and a few of his tunes wound up playing underneath the emergency-room romantic shenanigans on TV’s Grey’s Anatomy. But his professional success hid the chaos of his personal life: his current record is the first record he’s made since achieving sobriety about a year and a half ago. And he knows how lucky he is to be at this new stage in his life. “I was medicating myself,” he says, “and a lot of it had to do with the fact that the way life is portrayed in the industry is really that whole ‘sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll’ thing.”
Not that he blames the industry for his problems — or even that he thinks his case is anything special. “I just didn’t want to be another casualty,” he says.
So Stagger set out on the road to recovery. “Basically what happened,” he says, “was I was on tour and it got to a point where I could barely get myself from gig to gig, and some days I couldn’t — I had to have other people get me there.... I realized that something had to give. if I wanted to do this properly and do it justice, I was going to have to change.”
And change he did. With the help of friendly guest musicians including Steve Bays from Victoria buzz band Hot Hot Heat and Neal Casal from Ryan Adams and The Cardinals, he began working on Everything Is Real. “I was fairly new in my sobriety,” he says, “so I was like a new baby deer finding its legs. It opened up a whole new vulnerability, as opposed to being fucked up and vulnerable, this was actually from a real emotional place. My songwriting seems to have grown up a bit.... I basically got to make this album with a whole new perspective on life.”
His new positive perspective is obvious on Everything Is Real’s title track, where he announces, “I started living for the first time today / These clouds that covered my eyes, they’ve blown away.” And it’s hard to miss the autobiographical elements in the country-rock stomper “Hell of a Life,” with lyrics like “People were there were to see me play / But the band was so drunk / And Lord we blew it / Well, I guess I didn’t need their money that day.”
Newly sober and newly Albertan (he recently moved from his hometown of Victoria to Lethbridge), Stagger isn’t looking too far into the future. “I like touring so I’d just like to tour as much as possible,” he says, perhaps unconsciously applying the language of recovery to the language of the roadbound musician. “At this point, we’re just taking it day by day, show by show.”
Though he’s reluctant to talk about where he’s going next, his record makes it clear that he knows he’s going to get there. “Seems like we all have our devils and angels,” he sings. “My devil comes in a little brown jar. And sometimes you just gotta get lost in the music / Music’s gonna take you where you want to go.”
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