Logan Richard is one of music’s rarest creatures—a compelling and diverse songwriter who also shreds. The PEI-born-and-based artist has been sharpening both skills since he first picked up the guitar as a pre-teen, building a reputation as a deft, genre-fluid songsmith and peerless hired gun for some of Canada’s most exciting musicians. But his new full-length, Character Traits, collects the undeniable evidence of Richard’s talents under his own name as he navigates slick pop, spacey R&B, and soulful folk. As the thesis song and title track attests, he’s a 21st-century renaissance man in both skill and style. 

Influenced by his axe-slinging brother, artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan and John Mayer, his dad’s record collection, and his Acadian mom’s fiddle-playing family, Richard hit the stage at just 12 years old, cutting his teeth playing gigs around the island with a blues group filled out by his fellow young peers. He’s built his career as both a solo artist and in-demand live and session player, racking up experience over more than a decade and playing everywhere from dim blues dives to historical soft-seaters. All the committed hours have refined his work with nuances in technique and composition that allow him to express his many multitudes—a predilection that powers and deepens his new record, and reveals the wide scope of Richard’s artistry. 

“‘Character Traits” was the very last song that I wrote for the record. It came together in one sitting, which doesn't happen to me very often,” Richard says. “That song tied everything together—I don’t think there are any two songs on the album that sound super similar to each other. Each song touches on a different genre and lyrical theme. They all represent separate little character traits. They all reveal different aspects of what I'm capable of.” 

Throughout Character Traits, Richard navigates the trials and tribulations of youth with clear eyes and an uncommonly honeyed voice. There’s the previously mentioned consideration of identity in the thoughtful and autobiographical “Character Traits,” but Richard also investigates his role as a friend and family member in the supportive and dreamy “Up From Here” and crafts his own “Lean On Me” moment with the gently driving “Rolodex.” Restlessness permeates “The Grass Is Blue (Everywhere I Go),” a pensive, shuffling travelogue. And romance abounds, with Richard celebrating the sweetness of new love on the dizzy “Feel The World Spinning” and lamenting the pain of drifting apart against the big, bright piano of “Junk Drawer” and the hypnotic rhythms of “If You’re Gonna Change Your Mind.” Over the impossibly catchy “Feels This Way,” he flexes his guitar muscles with punchy fretwork flourishes as he fumbles his way through meeting a lover’s parents. For the stirring curtain-closer “Someday,” Richard admits he doesn’t have all, or even a good chunk of, the answers, but resolves to keep searching and asking questions: “It won’t be today, it won’t be tomorrow, but someday I’ll fly—someday I’ll find what I’m looking for.” 

Produced by friends and fellow artists David Myles and Joshua Van Tassel, Character Traits is the inevitable result of commitment to craft, a collection of considered and close-to-the-heart songs that provide a detailed picture of a songwriter hitting his stride.