And again, if you only like to listen to the music, that’s there. That’s just what I do because I have so much more to offer.
“If you’re a fan of Lights, you get more than just music. But if you’re not, ‘PEP’ is still just ‘PEP’ and me going overboard with a pep talk,” she said. “I’ve immersed ‘PEP’ into the ‘Skin & Earth’ world if that’s something you’re interested in. You can dive in as deeply as you want, or you can simply sit back and enjoy the music - which is arguably the best and most confident the eternally DIY-driven Lights has ever produced. There’s a 16-page mini-comic “filled with Easter eggs” to go along with “PEP,” of course, and the videos and artwork thus far all play around with the concept of something called the Clinic.
#BREAKING DAWN PART 1 SOUNDTRACK LISTEN SERIES#
Her last album, 2017’s “Skin & Earth,” came with a six-part comic series written and illustrated by Lights herself, and while this year’s aggressively (if deceptively) upbeat “PEP” - a gleamingly tuneful talisman against dark contemporary times - didn’t indulge her non-musical ambitions to quite the same extent it still finds the cosplay-loving nerdy-girl-at-heart developing the ever-expanding Lights universe even further. She’s gone from being the sweet-voiced pop outlier on local indie hardcore label Underground Operations, who made 2009’s head-turning debut “The Listening,” to a sort of living multimedia art project. To say Lights - born Valerie Poxleitner, but officially Lights Poxleitner-Bokan since her marriage in 2012 to Blessthefall’s Beau Bokan, with whom she had daughter Rocket in 2014 - has developed into a truly singular force over the past 15 years is a bit of an understatement. I’m looking at it right now and it’s broken and I’m f-ing keeping it. And I don’t know if it’s because I’m stubborn, but I’m keeping this mirror. We don’t think like people did 100 years ago. People used to think female orgasms were hysteria. And I’m keeping the f-ing mirror because we’ve moved past these old-school superstitions. “Everybody wants to blame the mirror and it pisses me off. And then bad sh- started to happen in succession after that and everybody wants to blame the mirror,” laughed Lights. At the beginning of the tour, I broke my mirror here in the back lounge.
But that still hasn’t quelled chatter amongst all involved of a tour curse. No one was dismembered by a slasher or a gang of “Hills Have Eyes”-esque cannibal mutants, mercifully, and not a date was missed due to a lot of expert logistical scrambling on Team Lights’ part. She and “all the girls” making up the pointedly 50 per cent female Baby I’m Back crew (“I’m horrified to say it’s the first time in my 15-year career that I have equality on the bus, but it’s a f-in’ vibe and it’s the way it always should have been,” she noted) were huddled at the back watching the brutal horror flick “ Martyrs,” no less. “Some would call it ‘cursed,’ but it’s still been incredible,” said Lights, reflecting on a 26-date return to the touring trail that has thus far survived: a devastating long-distance farewell to her cat of 18 years the recent, irreparable “bricking” of a precious laptop loaded with of scads of irretrievable music and art in progress the mercifully non-lethal electrocution of opener tiLLie before a show in Texas a broken foot incurred whilst leaping into the crowd at the end of a gig in Boston while wearing platform shoes and the subsequent, complete breakdown of the aforementioned tour bus somewhere in the boonies during the 10-hour drive between Kansas City and Denver late last week. Get your minds out of the gutter, you filthy pigs: the word in question is “cursed.” Which, for the record, the Timmins-bred, now Vancouver-based electro-pop Queen of the Geeks - we love you, Lady Gaga, but there can be only one - volunteers in reference to her current “Baby I’m Back” road show well before this old pal and fellow lover of all things fantastical, frightening and generally falling beneath the “occult” banner has a chance to make the joke during a catch-up conversation conducted from the Lights tour bus between sound check and showtime on an unusually sunny afternoon in Minneapolis. Lights busts out the “C-word” so quickly that I don’t even have to.