Music Is Medicine

In 2018, veracious Mohawk singer-songwriter Logan Staats was chosen from 10,000 hopeful contestants vying for a spot on the musical competition show The Launch. Staats won before an audience of 1.4 million viewers, officiating the breakthrough that would lead him to Nashville and Los Angeles. This also led to the release of his single “The Lucky Ones”, which won the Indigenous Music Award for Best Radio Single and reached #1 in Canada.

Staats has since come home to Six Nations of the Grand River, making the decision to reconnect with his roots. “I wanted to bring my songwriting back to the medicine inside of music, to the medicine inside of reclamation,” he says following a phase of constant travel and intensity. Since returning home, Staats has been able to create music authentically again, reclaiming his sound through honest storytelling and unvarnished, sometimes painful, reflection.

To Staats, music is a prescription for healing, thoughtfully composed and offered to listeners in need of comfort. With a renewed sense of self, he’s been working away on his highly anticipated album A Light in the Attic.

The songs on A Light in the Attic represent the sparks of a courageous journey. He sings of reconciliation, recovery from addiction, surviving intergenerational trauma and healing after heartbreak.

The lead single “Deadman” was written during Staats’ recovery. It’s a song of dual meaning, illuminating not only romantic love but a salvaged love for life itself. As Staats’ ancestors were residential school survivors, the video for “Deadman” was partially filmed on the property of the Mohawk Institute, a former residential school in Brantford, Ontario. (The Six Nations of the Grand River has since called for that location to be among grounds searched for remains.) The video follows Staats through his community, including Land Back Lane, where Six Nations land defenders have mobilized to protect the area from proposed subdivision development.

On the tear-jerking “California”, Staats sings of romantic agony and failed grand gestures. “It’s so sad and so dramatic,” he says, “but it’s a true story.”

With what could be an antidote to the heartache of “California”, “Wish I Knew Your Name” tells the story of Staats getting a ride from an elder when he was a kid. After he got in the car, he realized the woman’s husband’s ashes were along for the trip. It scared him then, but he’s come to view that moment as formative. “Of all the songs I’ve written, this one is my favourite,” says Staats. “It’s about un-definitive, enduring love.”

Staats’ love of home is at the heart of A Light in the Attic. “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 SainteMarie, 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, and in May he performed as a special guest at the 2023 Outside Looking In (OLI) Annual Showcase in Toronto, Canada’s largest Indigenous youth dance performance.

“I want young people to know there’s a reason to keep going,” he says. A Light in the Attic is proof of that reason. Staats says, “There is a way out of the dark.”