Last month, Canadian musician Lights—known to her friends and family as Valerie Anne Poxleitner-Bokan—released her sixth studio album, A6. An emotionally charged record riddled with moments of vulnerability, it wasn’t originally meant to keep that title. A6 was just a placeholder—standing for “album #6”—in her notebook when she began writing it. But as those writing sessions proceeded, that simple moniker began to take on a life of its own, its raw simplicity feeding into the atmosphere and identity of its songs, helping the album ease into what it ultimately became.
Which is to say that A6 is a record that shows how Lights has grown both as a musician and as a human being. Yet it doesn’t shy away from the trauma of its influences—she lays her heart on her sleeve here as she’s always done, but those moments of vulnerability are, ironically, presented with a new sense of confidence. It’s also a record that looks back at the past 15-plus years since she released her 2009 debut, The Listening.
Ahead of her sold-out headlining show at New York’s Bowery Ballroom at the start of June, she sat down in a coffee shop around the corner from the venue for a wide-ranging conversation about her life and the universe more broadly. It was tricky, but that conversation has, ultimately and with difficulty, been distilled into the five questions below.
There’s a noticeable sense of absence on this record, and yet you’re happily married, you have a kid, you have this successful career. Obviously there are always things beneath the surface, but how do you view that disparity between a happy life and artistic malaise?
It’s something that’s always being explored by me, emotionally. Is there ever a state of perfect happiness? No. We’re always challenging ourselves to want more and be more and see more and achieve more—and that does force you to live in an existing state of emptiness, because you can never feel fulfilled. But within that I’ve learned a lot about what is fulfilling—and that is making every moment matter instead of the big picture. The big picture’s where you step back and you look at it and you’re supposed to be happy about it, but what really matters is the moment and whether you’re happy within it.
So this whole record has been an exploration of what I’ve learned in the last six albums about existence in that time, the pain that you experience and how you learn from it, and the people you lose—and the emptiness that’s left there. You realize it’s not that they’re gone, but it’s their aura of possibility that’s gone. And that’s what A6 is about: everything you’ve learned in that in-between time, all the travel and the movement, and the understanding that people come and go. And then you can look back and ask, “OK, what do I actually want out of life?” So there’s an emptiness that exists, but that emptiness needs to exist in order to move forward.
Did writing these songs help you come to terms with that emptiness, or did it exacerbate it?
It’s more like processing it and allowing yourself to feel everything. A lot of the time we’re expected to be better or something—like, get through something and now you’re good. But I think the point is to just feel it, feel everything. So in the process of writing it, if you’re feeling it, that’s a great thing. You can feel the full spectrum, and there’s no expectation to be better on the other end. I think that everybody wants us to find the light at the end of the tunnel and find happiness and find retirement. But there is no ending. It’s just a constant exploration of emotion and heart and what you want at the moment. So these songs helped me learn that it’s OK to live in that moment.
“A6” feels vulnerable as a title, because there’s no artistic façade, no ribbon and bow put on these songs—it’s just “Hey, this is me and this is my record.” Why did you settle on that title?
Because it’s also a journal size, and I journaled a lot, because there were these vulnerable experiences leading up to it—in particular, cutting my hair off, for example. I was pretty messed up about that for the weeks leading up, though it felt amazing afterward. But I journaled a lot in that time about the experience of writing and all the things I was going through over the last couple years, and I found A6 is exactly that—it’s the things that you’d put on a page, but maybe wouldn’t know how to say out loud. But it’s also a lot of airport gates, or a vending machine selection, or a preset, or a highway. It’s one of those things that just exists everywhere, and it kind of represents everything, and the experience of life. That’s what it feels like.
With that in mind, do you feel this is your most personal record yet?
I would say so. I think it’s the least diluted version of me, because I produced it myself, I finished it at home, and then at an Airbnb in Berlin and did a little bit of recording in LA, where my drummer and guitar player live. And I had an opportunity to implement a lot of really personal, secret sounds into it, like recording the air late at night in Berlin, or the rain. You put them into the tracks and it adds to this ambience. So there’s subliminal personal levels to it that I think people can notice whether they realize it or not, and I think it all creates the heart and the soul of the music.
And the things I was able to write about, I could write about without being worried about what someone else will think. Sometimes when you’re in a writing session, you walk into a room of perfect strangers and you’re supposed to be vulnerable, so you automatically withhold to a certain degree, and then there’s a layer of inauthenticity that comes out in a song. With a record like this, I wanted to be able to get to the harder things, and I wanted to be able to try things—there’s a lot of screaming vocals on the record, and I would never, ever have tried that if I was in a session with other people. But when I’m alone and having a little vodka and thinking about life, I can do that.
Though this record is very much rooted in the present, it also casts an eye over your career to date. Do you recognize yourself when you play your old songs live now?
I’m still so connected to the trauma I experienced as a younger person. You know, I had 10 years of performance anxiety and tour trauma and an eating disorder and depression—and you try to pretend that never happened. I still feel really connected to that person, but I’m not that person anymore. But I am proud of that person and I feel good going back to that person, because you’re still connected. At the same time, I look back and I’m like, “That feels like a different person.” But that’s because I’ve grown because of that person. She walked so I could run.
