{"id":21688,"date":"2021-10-28T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-28T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=21688"},"modified":"2021-10-27T15:34:20","modified_gmt":"2021-10-27T22:34:20","slug":"victorias-leeroy-stagger-deals-with-heavy-topics-on-new-album","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2021\/10\/28\/victorias-leeroy-stagger-deals-with-heavy-topics-on-new-album\/","title":{"rendered":"Victoria’s Leeroy Stagger deals with heavy topics on new album"},"content":{"rendered":"

On October 15, Victoria singer\/songwriter Leeroy Stagger released his new album, Dystopian Weekends<\/em>. The album deals with some heavy themes: the song \u201cVentura,\u201d for example, addresses Stagger’s feelings around grief over the loss of a friend. And it makes sense that there are heavy themes on the album, considering Stagger was working on it through the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started the record at the beginning of March, right as things were starting to happen,\u201d recalls Stagger. \u201cIt was like being in a movie, because the first day everything\u2019s fine and then all of a sudden your phone starts dinging and you start reading the news and things are starting to get real.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stagger says that an anxiety crept in during the recording sessions, but they were all there to do a job.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Victoria singer\/songwriter Leeroy Stagger recently released his latest album (photo by Piper Ferguson).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cEverybody kinda knows that recording studios are not cheap, so we’re going through the work and trying not to let it affect your work too much, but it inevitably kind of casts an energy over the session, which I kind of could feel a little bit in the music,\u201d he says. \u201cNot in too much of a negative way, but just in a subconscious way, and then you start thinking about the lyrics in context of what’s happing to the outside world, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stagger says that Dystopian Weekends<\/em> is different than his last album.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s a record that I wrote and recorded kind of for myself, coming off of a record called Strange Path<\/em>, which was a little bit more of a commercial sounding record,\u201d he says. \u201cThis one is definitely… I don’t want to say it’s a selfish record, but it was definitely for me, I wanted to just do something fun and also reflective of the music that I was listening to at the time, which was a lot of Bob Dylan records, so I kind of wanted to pay homage to that late ’60s, early ’70s sound and play that style of music, and that’s kind of what I did.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for those themes mentioned earlier, Stagger says that the record deals with grief and growing up.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere’s a bunch of different little vignettes of life in this record,\u201d he says. \u201cThe song ‘Ventura’ is a song about my friend Neal Casal, who took his own life in 2019, and coming to grips with that. There’s a lot of adult, coming-of-age themes on the record, I suppose, in a lot of ways. ‘More Love Than Money’ is about coming back home to the west coast for me and moving my family back, and, actually\u2014ironically\u2014we hadn’t moved back at the time of making the record but, talk about art imitating life really, in a lot of ways, because that’s essentially what it’s about, and then six months later, after making the record, we made the decision to move back to the west coast. So, yeah, it’s kind of coming of age into adulthood, thematically.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Stagger, music in general comes down to a way for him to understand and to relate.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt kind of means a bunch of different things to me,\u201d says Stagger. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s a real true way to meet the outside world and kind of make sense of my emotions and emotional conflicts and inner conflicts. I find music is a real gateway to be able to understand those things better for myself, and I find it’s probably the closest art form that does that for me, that allows me to relate to the traumas in my life, the emotional conflict, and the joy in my life. I find that music is the thing that translates those emotions best for me, in any of the art forms, as opposed to visual arts or film, I find that music just is the thing that best translates those feelings for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leeroy Stagger
\nSaturday November 6 and Sunday November 7
\nLivestream album release shows
\nFriday November 12, Saturday November 13, and Sunday November 14
\nMary Winspear Centre (as part of Barney Bentall & The Cariboo Express)
\nleeroystagger.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On October 15, Victoria singer\/songwriter Leeroy Stagger released his new album, Dystopian Weekends. The album deals with some heavy themes: the song \u201cVentura,\u201d for example, addresses Stagger’s feelings around grief over the loss of a friend. And it makes sense that there are heavy themes on the album, considering Stagger was working on it through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21689,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-webexclusive"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t