Comic alter ego let Lights explore new worlds

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This article was published 30/03/2018 (2937 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canadian indie-pop artist Lights is still buzzing, just days after winning the Juno for Pop Album of the Year for her fourth LP, Skin & Earth.

“It was an awesome weekend, the whole thing was great,” says Lights, 30, of the Juno weekend in Vancouver, March 24 and 25. Her tour makes a stop Saturday at the Burton Cummings Theatre.

“We kicked it off right, that’s for sure. I won on the first night (Saturday) and on the second night I did this performance, which was really fun because it was pretty centred around the empowerment of women… it was a very amazing moment for me, a career highlight.”

Near the end of that performance, the flame-haired songstress was surrounded by massive screens projecting a dozen drawings of other female musicians nominated for Junos, including Shania Twain, Diana Krall, Alessia Cara, Grimes, Jessie Reyez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, among others.

Each of the illustrations was created by Lights herself, an expansion of the work she did with Skin & Earth, which, in addition to being a full-length record, also had a partnering comic book series written and illustrated by the musician.

The story of Skin & Earth takes place in Madison Oasis, the last city left in a post-apocalyptic world. The city is divided up into two sectors: the pink sector for the wealthy, who continue to deplete the few resources that are left, and the red sector for the working poor. It is a clear commentary on classism and environmental concerns, but largely, both the comic books and the album are about battling inner demons and the search for hope, even when life seems bleaker than ever.

“It was a topic that means something to me, I’ve dealt with depression in the past and struggled with mental health — I think a lot of people have — and we all go through our times (when) we’re experiencing it more than others, and maybe people don’t even recognize when they are going through that but it’s something that should be talked about,” she says.

“In our society, (mental health is) still a taboo thing, like we’re not allowed to talk about it, so we look at it like this big horrible mark on our past or a flaw, but I wanted to write a story that talked about it as just part of our journey, as almost this beautiful metaphor for the challenges that we face and for confronting our inner demons… learning about yourself and coming out the other end stronger for it.”

Lights — born Valerie Poxleitner, though Lights is now her legal first name — began the project with that storyline, using it to build both the comic and the album in tandem. She broke the story into 12 parts and then penned tracks to slot into each section. Even though that may seem like a process with tight writing parameters, she says being able to write through the eyes of her main character Enaia, or En — who Lights says is basically herself in another dimension — allowed her to explore undiscovered emotional territory.

“It was 100 per cent freeing,” she says, laughing.

“Lights was never allowed to write an angry song because there was always this positive aspect to my music and I just wanted to write an angry song — I get angry, I’ve been heartbroken, I’ve been there, I know how it is, so I was able to write songs like Savage, or songs about sex… I was able to be like, ‘This is what the story is about, this is what we’re going to write about and this is what the character is experiencing.’

“In reality, I was writing from personal experience but being able to conduit through the character helped me be more authentic. It was really amazing,” she says.

There are six issues of the comic that correlate to six tracks on the album; Lights says her experience in the comic book world has been overwhelmingly positive, and the community has been extremely welcoming — “I’ve actually never felt so accepted and it’s been awesome,” she says.

It seems likely more issues of Skin & Earth will come down the pipe at some point, but, as Lights says, it won’t be any time soon.

“You know, I hadn’t thought of that at all leading into it. I thought it would be this tidy, wrapped-up, six-issue series; but when I got to the end, it just felt like the beginning. It feels like the origin story. So I think there will be more, but because it’s a one-woman show, it might be years. But it will come.”

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @NireRabel