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| It's Kerli with curly hair... xD |
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| It may be unreadable, but 12 of the above albums are tributes to Tool :o |
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| Amy Lee in the music video for "What You Want" |
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| Lights live in action - photo from iamlights.com |
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| Lights (camera, action!) |
The jumping off point for Lights' frenetic new sound arrives at the end of the Canadian pop star's sophomore album, "Siberia," in the form of an epic, nine-minute synth jam called "Day One."
"Every second of that song is completely live," Lights says of the track in a recent phone interview. "It was a really special thing to throw in there. I didn't have to do it but I just thought it would be this really cool, musical adventure."
Two years after the 24-year-old Timmons, Ontario native made her major label debut with the glitteringly pristine pop production "The Listening," she found herself far removed from that lofty world and on the cusp of this cool new adventure. Banging away on a toy Yamaha keyboard double-wired through a makeshift cable to a drum machine, she began to experiment in the cluttered dining room that Toronto dance group Holy Fuck call their recording space.
Lights, born Valerie Poxleitner, met Holy Fuck's Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh at a British music festival a year earlier but, at first, the thought of working together never crossed her mind. Sometime later, while clubbing in Montreal, she heard the song "Where You Should Be" by UK dubstep producer Skream and had a revelation: her next record should embrace a darker, raw and rough-hewn quality to dirty up her pretty melodies and vocals.
"My music is very melodic and very pop forward," Lights says. "I wanted to evolve and go to another level with the next record. The initial thing that came to my mind was how can I contrast what I already have and bring two things together that make this one a little different?"
Holy Fuck certainly are different -- at least as far as Lights' shimmering, streamlined sound is concerned -- so at the suggestion of her manager, the CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi, she asked Borcherdt and Walsh to jam. "It seemed a little far out at the time," she says. "After having met them I didn't ever think that we'd be collaborating. You just never know what's gonna work and what's not."
She went into the first session with few expectations and wound up conceiving the album's thematic musical thrust and three of its songs: the title track, "Everybody Breaks A Glass," and "Day One," the tripped-out, nine-minute instrumental jam that closes the album.
From there, she began mapping out more songs with Borcherdt and her co-producer Thomas 'Tawgs' Salter (Fefe Dobson, Josh Groban). She wrote some songs in more traditional ways -- on acoustic guitar, for example -- and recruited Juno-winning rapper Shad for two guest verses, all the while careful to extract the minimalist grit that dubstep evokes but not necessarily its distinctive, wobbly beat structures (save for one instrumental breakdown).
Like any trend, dubstep has started to incur backlash from critics and producers alike the more ubiquitous it has become in clubs and mainstream pop production.
"I'm sure the days of dubstep are gonna come and go just like any other popular genre that comes in really hot and dissipates," she says. "Going back to tracks like 'I Want It That Way' and 'Larger Than Life' by Backstreet Boys, in that era there was a very prominent punching snare drum that marked the time. It's the little things, production-wise, that tend to date something. I'm learning about that as I go."
Alongside her music career, Lights is learning game design and software development through Alberta-based online school Athabasca University. An avid gamer and comic book nerd (the look for her debut album was heavily influenced by Wonder Woman), she's made forays into the world of online entertainment in 2009 through the 10-episode MTV motion comic series "Audio Quest: A Captain Lights Adventure," conceived in collaboration with Marvel Comics animator Tomm Coker.
Asked how she plans to creatively apply her computer science skills, she answers a number of ways: to code and manage her own website and social community, perhaps build bespoke software to use in composing future music or maybe to develop and design her own role playing game (RPG).
"Soundtracks to games have become more crucial than ever," she says. "But there has yet to be a game that involves music in a really cool way -- like some kind of RPG where you're exploring and looking for sounds."
The character in Captain Lights, for example, is an audiophile that traverses the universe collecting specific sound samples. "How cool would it be to apply a concept like that to a game?"
In the meantime, she's adopting a more natural look for "Siberia" in line with the record's grimier sounds. The video for lead single "Toes" was shot guerilla style in alleys and subway stations around Toronto and she hopes that earthy vibe will carry through future videos and live gigs. "There were no glamorous little space outfits, spaceships or energy plasma fights," she says. "It's all true and gritty. I feel good at this place with this record."
