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<\/a>\u201cWhen people came over in the 1700s and got here, the restless ones, the ones that couldn\u2019t settle, that were never satisfied, kept moving west,\u201d he says, \u201cwhereas the people that were happy-go-lucky, super satisfied, got off the boat in Nova Scotia and were like, this will do great.\u201d<\/p>\n
While this album doesn\u2019t have much in the way of punk rock chaos, leaning more toward acoustic strains, the ethos of fighting back and remembering the struggles of where you come from stayed front and centre in Staggers\u2019 mind while he wrote. A book by Scottish activist Alastair McIntosh called Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power<\/i> sparked these ideas for Stagger, fanning the creative flames that led to Pilgrimage<\/i>.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe main thing that I took from that book was this idea of indigeneity, of finding out where you come from,\u201d says Stagger. \u201cI was starting to feel fairly culturally rudderless in this country as of late and looking around at all these beautiful cultures that I see from Indigenous people here and immigrant communities here and saw how beautiful the communities were.\u201d<\/p>\n
This sparked questions for Stagger about his own heritage, of which he knew little aside from that his family was Scottish and had been pushed out of their land many moons ago, leading them to emigrate to Canada.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t know about my culture, I didn\u2019t know about the customs that that my people had back then, and when I started to look into it, it made a lot of sense to me, storytelling, music gatherings, sweat lodges, totems, all these things that I\u2019ve always kind of felt. To discover this, to me, it was a spiritual pilgrimage of my own,\u201d he says. \u201cThe second book that I read of Alastair\u2019s was called Poacher\u2019s Pilgrimage<\/i>, which was I guess a bit of a pilgrimage of his to define where he came from.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the help of fellow musician Joel Plaskett acting as producer, as well as myriad other musician friends appearing throughout the record, Pilgrimage<\/i> began to take shape.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s definitely an intimacy to this record that that I\u2019ve never done before\u2026 I mean, I set out to make a folk record, like, truth be told I didn\u2019t know that I wanted drums or electric guitars on it, but as we started the process, you know, Joel said, well, let me throw some drums on here and I was like, \u2018Oh, this is good!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
All of this culminated in Stagger hoping to create an album that felt like a gathering of friends, and facilitated human connection.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is probably my calling, whether it\u2019s the music part or the connection part and connecting people with themselves in their own… I don\u2019t want to say \u2018spirit\u2019 but finding different ways of seeing the world through music. I think it\u2019s really important and I guess that\u2019s kind of my calling.\u201d<\/p>\n