A STORY COMES TO LIGHTS
Artist mixes music with graphic tale
Canadian alt-pop singer Lights was born Valerie Anne Poxleitner in Timmins, Ont. Her whole life, people have mispronounced her surname as “Pointdexter.” The Mission-based artist likes it.
“It sounds totally nerdy, but I’ll take it in full,” Lights says. “At heart, that’s exactly what I am. I just never really thought that I would be the one creating something that took so much of that world to heart.”
She’s talking about Skin & Earth. The fourth album from the multiple Juno Award winner is a song cycle based around a six-part comic book series of the same name. Conceived, written and drawn entirely by the cosplay-loving Lights, the storyline revolves around a character named Enaia — En for short. This flame-haired alter ego and a companion character who looks a great deal like her real-life husband, Blessthefall singer BeauBeau Bokan, first appeared in a 30-second video teaser last year.
An adventure in image and sound comes alive in the teaser, which includes snippets of the debut single Giants: “In the ruins of a bygone opulence, where humanity faces its final days, there lives a soul caught between where fear is fed and hope is lost. Something is found.”
The first edition of Skin & Earth was published last July. Giants and its accompanying music video dropped earlier on June 15 and Skydiving followed on July 14. Savage arrived on Aug. 11 and New Fears on Sept. 15, and Fight Club was the last track to precede the release. The project took years to complete.
“I’ve been an avid comic reader for years, been drawing and painting for ages, so it was not outside of my skill set to try this,” she says. “Having always been drawn to the work of female creators in that very male-dominated world, I liked the idea that it could be me breaking it down, too. The missing link was how to do it all.”
Advice from comic gurus such as Brian K. Vaughan (Y: the Last Man, Runaways), Jamie McKelvie (The Wicked + the Divine) and G. Willow Wilson (Ms. Marvel) helped to get her keen on pursuing the project.
Hard research from books, online sources and plenty of webinars to master digital drawing tech and storyboard methods all played a part in creating Skin & Earth. Of course, Lights was already a writer so, in essence, this was just an additional delivery platform.
“The last issue came out in December 2017 and I am so proud of it and having so much fun, even taking it to Cannes for a big cosplay convention,” she says. “So much creative juice flows from creating a world down to all the merch, the videos and the characters and place I’ve created. The comic hobbyists world is so passionate about the details and the lore and the more you get into that, the more interesting it is for you.”
Lights has turned on a whole new fan base. Tapping into the comic world not only gives artists a kind of longevity that is quite different from being a mere musical act, it has also propelled the 40-date Skin & Earth tour to sell out almost every VIP package in every market within days of the tour announcement. That’s what you want coming back after a three-year break since positive press for 2014’s Little Machines.
“I’ve been touring since ’08, and have had a dedicated fan base in the U.S., but this is very much about the comic,” she says. “VIPs get background on the comic, photos, some acoustic songs and stuff that will make it really special. It took a year holed up in Mission in the woods getting cabin fever to draw that comic, so this is a great reception.”
Thinking back to such laboured and painful concept albums as Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceans or Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Skin & Earth seems concise and unpretentious. The book reads well, the art is solid and contemporary and the music is pristine, modern pop with tinges of electro, dance and arena-sized choruses bound to have wide appeal. Fight Club is one of the most dance-ready tunes she’s ever recorded.
You get the sense this would be perfect music to form the soundtrack of a live-action film or — since everyone is doing it these days — a really cool Netflix series.
“I think about all the ways that I could take this world and maybe there is a continuing arc and how completely awesome that would be,” she says. “But obviously, that is way different than creating a comic, which is basically zero dollars to create, but a Netflix show is a whole other level. It’s a dream of mine, but likely a ways away, yet I could make my dream of doing soundtracks happen right now I think.”
Getting to do that on her own show would be “incredibly rad.”
The main challenge with crafting the comic and the album was to have something that was much more powerful taken together, but which could also stand alone and work. For that to occur, she approached the writing of the music differently than her previous projects.
“Everything will sound like me, obviously, because it is, but I let go
of the reins in terms of production and instrumentation this time like never before,” she says.
“I don’t have musical theory or great chord knowledge, but what I have got me where I am. This time I thought if I focused on the vocals, lyrics and the narrative line and let others work on my initial melodies, I could get something that branched out from my previous work.”
A case in point is New Fears. Her favourite song on the new album, it reflects when En is at her lowest and preparing to meet her new spiritual friend. She knew where the song was going and needed to go.
“But then I let whoever was working with me just run with it creatively and the session turned out to be something different than what I had done before,” she says.
“It was so freeing to branch out and work with people like Josh Dun of 21 Pilots who played on Savage and Almost Had Me.”
For the coming tour, Lights is heading out with the most ambitious stage and lighting design of her career. Naturally, frames from Skin & Earth will be featured as sequencing of the material from the new album to give the show a full dramatic arc.
You might assume Lights is so focused on Skin & Earth that playing fan faves such as Drive My Soul or Running with the Boys is not of much interest.
That’s not the case.
“Not at all, I love a lot of those songs and don’t tire of playing them,” she says. “And I often change the way I perform my material, be it acoustic or what have you, so that keeps it interesting for audiences.”
Given how well Skin & Earth has been received, would she consider bringing her first comic character, a tragic frog named Monty who dies in every story, into a book?
“Oh, I have really been considering this, but Monty was the most preschool character you could imagine, but what happened to him was always really 18+,” she says.
“So I’ve asked people if they think I should tame it right down into a kid’s show my daughter Rocket Wild could enjoy or just go for the whole full-on Adult Swim thing.”
Stay tuned to see if Monty leaps into the pages or on screen in future.