Lights Singer Interview - A6 Album, Writing Her Songs, Tour

Over the past 16 years, Canadian artist Lights has built a stellar reputation as a cutting-edge singer/songwriter who sings, writes songs, and plays most of the instruments on her recordings. She has won multiple Juno Awards, including winning Pop Album of the Year three times. She combines pop, electronic and alternative styles to create her own distinctive sound.

Lights has previously released five albums, starting in 2009 with her debut album, The Listening. Now in 2025, she recently released her sixth album, called A6 (via Virgin Records), which Lights says is her most deeply personal work to date.

A6 is a strong collection of vibrant electronic/pop songs, feisty alternative cuts, and some softer, more reflective songs. Highlights include the boisterous anthem “Alive Again,” the hooky, rhythmic track “Clingy,” the synth-wave dance cuts “Damage” and “Surface Tension,” and the melodic midtempo song, “Take It Easy.” Notably, Lights wrote all the songs by herself, played several instruments, and did much of the recording at her home studio in British Columbia. Additional recording was done in Berlin and Los Angeles.

Lights discussed the making of her new album and her vision for it. “In this landscape I realize it’s a flex to make it this far doing what you love—not just in this industry, but in life,” she says. “I’ve given most of my years to the creation of something beautiful and affirming and transportive. It’s my humble offering to the world. Over years of self-reflection through this art form, l’ve found that happiness and peace and actualization comes from the tumult and depth and pain and bliss of every moment that we are given. It’s remembering where we came from and never giving up on what we hope for.”

Lights (whose birth name is Valerie Anne Poxleitner), was born in Timmins, Ontario, Canada, and she mostly grew in a town called North Bay (also in Ontario). She learned to play guitar, keyboards and other instruments, and over the years she developed her production and engineering skills.

In 2009 Lights released her first album, The Listening, which quickly established her as a talented artist to watch. She subsequently released her albums Siberia (2011), Little Machines (2014), Skin & Earth (2017) and Pep (2022). Impressively, she has won Juno Awards for New Artist of the Year, Pop Album of the Year (three times), and Dance Recording of the Year. In addition, she has been honored by the Canadian Radio Music Awards and the Canadian Independent Music Awards.

Here’s the video of Lights’ song, “Alive Again.”

Interestingly, Lights’ artistic endeavors go beyond her music career. She is also known for being a gifted comic book author and artist. When she released her albums Skin & Earth and Pep, she also created a six-issue comic book series that was connected to the songs on these albums.

Currently, Lights has launched a major headline tour of North America. The tour started with shows in Victoria and Vancouver (British Columbia), and includes dates in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, New York, Boston and Toronto.

We are pleased to do this new Q&A interview with Lights. She discusses her earlier albums, her new album A6, her songwriting, and her concert tour.

DK: I read that you’re from the city of Timmins in Canada. How did you get started with music, playing instruments, and writing songs?

Lights: Timmins was where I was born, although I didn’t live there that much. After Timmins, I grew up in a small town called North Bay, and I think my earliest introduction to the power of music was when my dad would play. He loved music and he played acoustic guitar in our living room. I’d hear him play throughout the house, and it had this power to make us feel, and to protect us and teach us, and I’ve always wanted to harness that power.

DK: Do you play most instruments, including keyboards, guitars and programming?

Lights: Yeah, I play on sort of a utilitarian level. I’m probably the best at guitar, but i can make good patch on a synth and play the basics to get my ideas down. I can play and program drums enough to get the songs the way I want. Probably the only instruments I don’t play is live bass and live drums. So on A6 it was a great personal experience making a record. I produced everything and I played everything, other than some of the live guitars and all the live bass and drums, which are played by my guitar player Brodie Tavares who’s my musical director, and his brother Stefan, who tour with me. So it was a very personal, intimate creation process for that record, which I recorded in my little studio at home, and the rest I finished at a studio in Berlin.

Here’s the video of Lights’ song, “Clingy.”

DK: Early in your career you had success with your first two albums, The Listening and Siberia, which both won the Juno Award for Pop Album of the Year. Can you talk about these albums?

Lights: The Listening was my first record; it came out in 2009. It was 16 years ago. I was such a different person then, but it was such a meaningful experience for me to make that record, because I was going through a lot of mental health issues. I struggled with depression and a lot of personal stuff. I was living on my own for the first time, so it was like a coming-of-age record, learning to live in your own emotions and feelings. There’s a song called “Face Up” that was really helpful to me at that time, to write and create and sing and perform.

On Siberia, I started to experiment with heavier synth tones, and there were some dubstep influences on that, and a grittier production style. I had a lot of fun making a song called “Flux and Flow” on that record. It’s really heavy, with these soft vocal tones, and these ripping parts, and these intimate parts with sparkly synths. I was singng about nerdy things…lyrics about the data on the back of a CD, but finding ways to compare that with like a life journey.

DK: After that you released your albums Little Machine, Skin & Earth, and Pep. Can you talk about the evolution of your music, creating those albums?

Lights: Each album reflects the experiences of my previous couple of years, as life shifts and musical taste that were influencing at that time. I think with Little Machine, I was leaning a little more into the synth wave, new wave nostalgia throwback. One of my favorite songs is “Boys of Summer” by Don Henley. So I wanted to capture that essence by bringing that feeling…a more vintage style instrumentation with live drums, old chorus and guitar tones in that album, and bring that old nostalgia feeling, And that was the first record I made after having a kid, so it’s about that journey and learning to love in new ways.

And the next record, Skin & Earth, was me challenging myself as a creator, and fulfilling my dream of creating a comic. I’m a big comic fan so i thought…I’m gonna make a concept album that is paired with a six-issue comic series that I wrote and drew, and it was perfectly tied in with the story line and the character. So that was a special album cycle for me as a fan of comics and as a fan of the nerd world.

Here’s the video of Lights’ song, “Damage.”

With my record Pep, that was sort of a blended follow-up to Skin & Earth. I did do a mini-series spin-off, that helped with the rollout of Pep and the announcement of it, and it was a spin-off of the Skin & Earth world, but with just two different characters. So it was fun to integrate that. With Pep, it was very extravagant and it felt like I was presenting myself as this product, because at that point in my career I was trying to regain my own autonomy and the empowerment of what I feel as an individual, my sexuality. I’d been deconstructing out of religion for about a decade at that point, so it was almost like reclaiming my sense of who I am.

I think a lot of people early on in my career gridded me out as this sweetheart, this innocent little individual. And you know, when people grid you out and their social understanding of you, it’s hard for them to picture you any other way. I had to present myself in the way that I had grown to become. So Pep was about reclaiming my adulthood, and showing that I’ve grown in every way. I’ve come a long way in all those years.

I feel like I understand my place, which in entertainment you are a product, and it was this tongue-in-cheek look at that. It was really extravagant—it was big, it was bright, it was bold. And I had a lot of fun making a video and doing all the little side comics, and how all the videos were integrated into that comic and parts of that experience.

It’s really fun; I’ve always liked to do more than just put out music. I’ve always liked to integrate multimedia across it. But when I got to my new record, A6, I decided just to focus on the music. I’m gonna get right back to where it was at the beginning, the way I used to write, amd the way that I used to present my music to the world. To make some music and put on a rock & roll show.

DK: With your new album, I read your bio and it says that A6 is your most deeply personal album yet. Can you talk about creating this album and the personal side of it?

Lights: I think I have a lot of perspective at this point in my career. A6 is effectively album six, but it also represents a journey and all the things that I’ve learned and gone through in the last 16 years of my career. I can look back and take all the things I’ve learned through the hard times and the good times, and put it into this feeling. It’s a very very feeling-based record. Some of the songs are about grief. I lost a close loved one, and coming close to that proximity of death makes you zoom out and look at things in different ways, and recognize your place in the universe. It’s a self-exploratory look…you look at yourself inwardly and be able to recognize where all the past things have taken you, and being proud of that person. And it’s very personal because it’s the first record that I produced myself from top to bottom and had full control over.

Here’s the video of Lights’ song, “Take It Easy.”

DK: On your new album, I like your new song “Alive Again,” which has a great chorus and it’s about feeling alive. What inspired you to write this song?

Lights: I’m glad you noticed the chorus. That was a bit of an experimental chorus because it has no melody and no rhyme (laughs). I’ve never made a chorus like that. When I was writing it, it was hard to say if that will work. It’s really just this chant, and this chant is about that zooming out feeling of like you know, the pale blue dot concepts…we are all actually so fragile; we all could die at any second. We’re so lucky to have this existence. Look at that like it’s a hopeful thing, and sometimes it takes being at rock bottom to even recognize that if you’re just coasting through life. It’s\s hard to recognize that maybe you’re not grasping all the possibilities and all the opportunities, or pursuing all your dreams like you could be. We’re literally laying flat on the ground, looking up and seeing the whole picture. So this is about a rock bottom anthem, recognizing that this is it and make the most of it.

DK: I also like your song “Clingy, which is catchy and has a funky groove. Can you talk about writing this song?

Lights: “Clingy” was a work in progress that transformed over time. The part that really stuck out to me was that intimate chorus, and I was carving out the baseline for months, trying different toplines over it, and finally coming up with something very intimate. I kept hearing the word “clingy” because it felt like this uncomfortable intimacy in the chorus. So I ran with that idea, and it took me a long time to get the verses where I wanted them. Then I went to L.A. and sat down with my guitar player, and we put down some sounds. We asked, “What would this sound like” Let’s try a grungy, almost Nirvana reference for the guitar tones and start to fill that out.” Some songs come very quickly, like “Alive Again” and “Damage.” But with “Clingy,” it was sort of a carving out project that lasted months, and I’m happy with the outcome.

DK: I want to ask you about your current concert tour. I read that most of your shows have already sold out. Can you talk about your new tour?

Lights: The tour is going so great; I think it’s my best setlist. I have enough songs now in my career that I can curate a setlist of a certain vibe. I don’t have to just put in songs and play them. I have a lot of variety across my discography in terms of genre. So finally I can pick the songs across all of my eras that suit the songs from my new record, A6. So I was able to build a setlist the new A6 songs, even though over half the set if songs from my other records. So the setlist is this perfect flowing story through almost all of my eras that feels really cohesive. I’m lucky that a lot of my fans have been listening for a long time, and so they enjoy getting to recall the early days and experience the last 16 years of my music. I’m lucky in my career that I’ve had a consistent fanbase. It’s remained steady and they’ve always been here and supported me.