Lights, at the end of the tunnel
Pop star wrote and drew a six-part comic series to accompany her high-gloss album
It’s the last night of a trip away from husband and child to her old hometown of Toronto, and Lights is partying it up as only a pop star can, by hunching over a desk in her management company’s downtown office with a Sharpie in hand to autograph 2,000 individual posters advertising her new album, Skin & Earth.
To be fair, she has a nice a view of the CN Tower from where she sits and steps have been taken to alleviate the drudgery of the task ahead — “We have vodka and Chicago mix and ice cream,” glows a text message received en route to the interview — but it’s still shaping up to be a long night.
Yet when the whip is finally cracked to get going, she attacks the stacks of printers’ boxes around her with an unfailingly good-natured efficiency that says a lot about how she’s been able to pull off her latest project: writing and recording her fourth official album while simultaneously writing and illustrating a six-part science-fiction comic-book series to go along with it — while also doing her best to be a good mom to the daughter, Rocket, she and partner Beau Bokan (of California punk outfit Blessthefall) welcomed into the world 31⁄ years ago.
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“I don’t know what I did with time before I had a kid. After I had a kid, I value every minute of time that I have alone and I don’t take it for granted anymore,” says Lights, née Valerie Anne Poxleitner in Timmins, Ont., 30 years ago, nevertheless conceding that Skin & Earth’s current multimedia sprawl has far outstripped her initial ambitions of producing a single comic to accompany the record.
“It’s been a lot of work, but I’m almost done. I have 30 pages left to colour of the last issue, and the last one is a double-issue so it’s technically seven issues. But it’s just grown as it went, and I think that’s the only way it could have been accomplished, because if I had known that this was going to be the scope of the project when I first decided to do it, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I tricked myself into it.”
While Lights has dabbled in drawing and painting for years and is a voracious consumer of comic books and sci-fi herself, she confesses she had “no f---ing idea what I was doing” when she threw herself into the Skin & Earth assignment. She read books on the art of comic-book composition, sought “the sage advice of people I know and love in the industry” such as Brian K. Vaughan, Jamie McKelvie, G. Willow Wilson and DC Comics luminary Jim Lee, and generally “went to YouTube university,” mainlining as many tutorials and “webinars” on the subject as she could find.
Meanwhile, as she fleshed out the post-apocalyptic universe through which Skin & Earth’s scarlet-haired, decidedly Lights-like heroine, Enaia Jin, would move and started feeding songs into the storyline and the storyline back into the songs, the whole enterprise just kept expanding and expanding. She began drawing in June of last year. Only now, with two issues on the stands via publisher Dynamite Entertainment and the third just about to arrive roughly in tandem with this weekend’s release of the Skin & Earth album, is the end in sight.
“I just knew I wanted to do it and I just kind of figured it out as I went,” she says. “The amount of pages just started to grow and grow and grow, and I’m learning how comics work in the process of writing this thing. Like, I didn’t know comics are 23 to 25 pages of content with two to three pages of ‘back matter.’ I didn’t know how to deliver the assets . . . I’ve gotten a lot faster and more efficient and better at it, and you can even see the progression in the comic. I actually had to go back after I’d completed the bulk of the work and redo the first issue for the most part — redo pages out of it — because I got better at it.”
Lights wasn’t only tricking herself into nearly biting off more work than she could chew with Skin & Earth. She also slipped an entire concept album past her gatekeepers at Universal Music Canada and Warner Bros. Records in the States before they realized what she was doing, mainly because the high-gloss material on Skin & Earth is the straight-up poppiest and most commercially friendly she’s ever recorded.
Her last record, 2014’s excellent Little Machines, was a veritable cornucopia of synth-pop delights and a highly inviting followup to the dubstep-shocked “difficult second album” that was 2011’s Siberia, albeit one whose release unfortunately coincided with the outbreak of abuse allegations against Lights’ former manager, disgraced CBC radio personality Jian Ghomeshi. Conveniently, she was scheduled to play one of two Toronto dates on the Little Machines tour at the Danforth Music Hall the day that story broke.
“That was the day it all went down,” she sighs, preferring not to comment further. “I couldn’t leave the bus.”
Anyway, now part of Last Gang Entertainment’s management wing, Lights is clearly aiming a dart at the mainstream this time around. Skin & Earth — recorded with collaborative input from the likes of Purity Ring’s Corin Ruddick, Alan Wilkis of Big Data, Twenty One Pilots drummer Josh Dun and former Boy mastermind Stephen Kozmeniuk — is big and burnished and seems explicitly designed to give the likes of Lorde, Carly Rae Jepsen and Lady Gaga a run for their money in the “classy pop chick” sweepstakes. Which is why no one could really stop her when she finally revealed she was planning it as a concept album.
“I’ve always been okay with being this kind of ‘niche,’ ‘alt-pop’ thing, but with this, I was like, ‘I’ve put so much f---ing work into this sh-- I want people to hear it.’ I had to make these songs accessible and big. I wanted to push myself out of those boundaries because I wanted to reach more people,” she says.
“I actually didn’t tell anybody about the idea until they’d picked out songs they liked. We’d done months and months of writing and there was a couple of songs everyone was excited about — ‘Giants’ was written and everyone was stoked on it — and I was, like, ‘FYI: this is a concept album. Here’s some of the art. This is what’s happening.’ And there was nothing to argue with because I’m doing all the work, it’s not costing them any money and the tunes were good, the tunes stand alone. I wasn’t sure how everyone was going to react, but everyone was f---ng stoked. Everyone was so stoked. And it just proved to me that everybody in the industry is just ready for new ideas and crossover media.”
Good thing, too, because Lights has plenty of ideas for more crossover media already ricocheting around in her head. Prodded as to whether she’ll do a comic book for the next record, she giggles: “I don’t know that I can ever not now.”
Skin & Earth has drawn decent reviews among comics bloggers, and Lights has already met fans “who’ve never even picked up my music” during appearances at Comic-Con in San Diego and the recent Fan Expo in Toronto. She has also received emails from comic-book shops asking her to come in to do signings because her strongly feminine title has “not only brought more women into the store, but also first-time comic-book readers.”
“That’s two amazing things that I never thought would be side effects of creating this,” she says. “As far as everyone knows, there’s nothing to come after this. But I don’t think I can stop there . . . I’m already writing the next arc.”