The Prismatic Arts Festival, in association with The Carleton, presents Basset + Logan Staats on Friday, October 6th. Show time is 8 PM and tickets – in various combinations – are available HERE.
Toronto-based indie-folk duo, Basset, are full of timeless heart. Acoustic songwriters Sam Clark and Yasmine Shelton will take you through city streets in the hours before the world has woken, or to a corrugated steel home north of the treeline.
Basset brings a deep love of the natural world to their gorgeously meditative and critically acclaimed debut album, In The Clay, from September of 2022. Produced by Joshua Van Tassel, the ten songs on In The Clay explore various themes of life in change, Shelton and Clark’s travels around Northern Ontario, the Canadian and American prairies, their lives in Toronto, and the many characters who have crossed their paths. With comparisons to The Milk Carton Kids, Hozier, and Bon Iver, their inventiveness shines through fiddle and intricate harmonies, with Shelton and Clark’s voices wrapping around each other like twin flames in a warm fire.
In 2018, veracious Mohawk singer-songwriter Logan Staats was chosen from 10,000 hopeful contestants vying for a spot on musical competition show, The Launch. Before an audience of 1.4 million viewers, Staats won, officiating the breakthrough that would lead him to Nashville and Los Angeles, and to his single “The Lucky Ones,” winning the Indigenous Music Award for Best Radio Single. Upon its release, “The Lucky Ones” was the number one song in Canada.
In the years between now and then, Staats has come home, making the intentional decision to re-root at Six Nations of the Grand River: “I wanted to bring my songwriting back to the medicine inside of music, to the medicine inside of reclamation,” he said following a phase of constant travel and intensity.
To Staats, music is a healing salve, contemplatively composed and offered to listeners in need of comfort. Since returning home, Staats has been able to create music authentically again, reclaiming his sound through honest storytelling and unvarnished, sometimes painful reflection.
An evocative testament to rock’s cathartic spirit, the album, A Light in the Attic, was recorded with borrowed microphones at Staats’ apartment, at Six Nations recording studio Jukasa, and at downtown Brantford’s Sanderson Centre for the Performing Arts.