LIGHTS Looks to the Future

Canada

LIGHTS Looks to the Future

Mon., May. 25, 2009 9:27 AM PDT by Sofi Papamarko

Sonia Mansillo

At the tender age of 22, LIGHTS has accomplished more than most Canadian singer-songwriters will during their lifetime. She's made respectable headway on the charts, her music has been featured in commercials and she was recently awarded the 2009 New Artist of the Year Juno—an honour previously bestowed upon hotshots like Feist, Michael Buble and Avril Lavigne.

"(I'm) being recognized a little bit more," says the bright-eyed and energetic young entertainer who was born Valerie Poxleitner. "The day after the Junos, I was on the front page of Metro...it was such a big shock. The general feeling is that it's a big acknowledgment of the hard work I've been doing for the past few years and it merits me as an official Canadian musician."

LIGHTS has just finished mastering her full-length debut, The Listening (due out in August), and is currently working on a new music video. She is tight-lipped where the concept is concerned, but she teases that it has "taken me at least a month of preparation." Despite her down-to-earth nature, her videos all have a similarly space-y theme, looking the way people in the '60s thought the future might be like.

"Growing up, I was always blown away by Star Trek and Barbarella and Logan's Run. The retro sci-fi thing. It was sort of obvious that it wasn't real and that gave you the right to do crazy things...(like) build a rocket with an etch-a-sketch machine! It opened the door to possibilities and kept the budget relatively low," she laughs.

LIGHTS' Juno win was ever-so-slightly upstaged when her manager, Canadian media personality Jian Ghomeshi, made international headlines after being on the receiving end of Billy Bob Thornton's infamous poutiness. Call it the Mashed Potatoes Incident, if you will.

"I was so proud of him," says LIGHTS of the way Ghomeshi conducted himself on-air. "Billy Bob had a nasty attitude...and Jian is just so smart. He treats everyone the same. He treats me just as well as he would treat a stranger on the street. He's so diplomatic and really good at talking people through issues. It was a great learning experience for me. You have to learn how to deal with curve balls."

Catch LIGHTS live this summer at V-Fest and the Warped Tour and on the road with Keane in the fall.