Seeing the Lights

FEW people like working towards them, but sometimes a deadline can be a good thing.

Certainly that’s the feeling of Lights Poxleitner after the long struggle she had to complete her third album Little Machines.

“Part of the frustration was the aimless task of writing with no end in sight,” she says of her follow-up to the more experimental Siberia, which had seen her collaborate with fellow Canadians Holy F***.

“When I started on the record there was no deadline, I was just writing with the idea that once I had it I would know.”

In the end Lights penned 43 songs for the 11-track album – but felt every one.

“I got really stuck with writer’s block,” she says. “I was in this place where I had to re-understand why I do it, and what I love about music.

“The longer you wait between records the more the pressure begins to build up. Not only were my fans expecting more music, but the people who work with the label. I wanted to make a better record than I had before, but I had to rediscover who I was and what I wanted to do.”

It got so bad that Lights, who had been prolifically writing songs since she was a teenager, was unable to listen to any other music.

“I knew too much about the way it was made,” she says. “I felt I knew what they were trying to do. You don’t have that negativity when you first get into music – then everything is amazing.

“When I was 14 I would spend hours on the eight-track recording ideas. During that time there was one record which never stopped feeling cool – In Decay by Com Truise. It was a down-tempo instrumental record, it sounded so cool to me.”

To get her creative juices flowing Lights decided to flex her creative muscles in a different way.

“If music wasn’t working I had to find other ways,” she says. “I got into poetry and painting. I made myself write a poem every night, and read a lot of life-stories, discographies and the career-paths of different artists. I discovered things I loved about Patti Smith in particular.”

The block only lifted at the end of 2013 when Lights realised she had enough material to go into the studio again. The result was arguably her most accessible album so far. Little Machines is shot through with electro-pop choruses and hooks which are hard to shake, particularly on singles Running With The Boys and Up We Go and album highlight Muscle Memory.

“I was writing and saying things I wanted to get off my chest,” she says. “We went into the studio in January 2014, I had my baby in February, and then went back into the studio because I wanted to go on with it! I’m heavily involved in the creation of the music – I’m not just there to do a vocal and leave.”

Having her first child, Rocket Wild, with Blessthefall’s Beau Bokan in 2014, helped reawaken Lights’s love of music.

“My baby loves music, even if the worst pop song comes on the radio she will be banging her head to it,” she says. “She loves the rhythm. It reminds me of when I wasn’t so judgemental about music. What made me get into music in the first place was that I could make something beautiful which could affect people out of nothing.”

She is already thinking about album number four – finding time on plane journeys and in the tour bus to put down ideas. “I’ve been listening to a lot of EDM,” she says. “I’ve got a new song called Zero Gravity now too. It’s about finding little quiet moments to express yourself.”

Duncan Hall