How 2014 taught Lights all about living in the moment

Lights must be exhausted, but it’s impossible to tell because she looks so energetic.

Not only is she in the middle of a cross-Canada tour promoting her third studio album Little Machines, but she’s brought her daughter on the road with her as well. Rocket Wild Bokan was born Feb. 15 and she’s in the middle of her first fever, the singer says.

“It’s an added layer of duties and responsibilities, but it takes away from a lot of the arbitrary pressures that I’ve felt before,” Lights, whose real name is Valerie Anne Poxleitner, says. “I just enjoy every moment more, and that’s the beauty of being a mom.”

So much has changed in Lights’s life this year. The writing and recording of Little Machines came after what she’s called a “dry spell” in other interviews. She was having trouble writing and was feeling plenty of what she’s called imagined pressure from all sorts of sources when it came to creating the record.

“I just wanted to make something so great and much better than anything I’ve ever done,” she says. “You want to do that every time, and that’s easier said than done.

"When you’re sitting there and you have nothing and you want something, you want a certain product, and you need to get there somehow. You have to just take it a step at a time. You can’t look at the whole thing at the end.

"It was a journey to work through all the songs, figure out what I wanted to say again - I’m in a different place in my life than I was on the first record or the second record.”

There’s certainly a sense of searching throughout Little Machines. It was recorded with Lights’s live band - the first time she’s ever done that, she says. It uses plenty of ‘70s and '80s synthesizers to create what she calls “classic electronic feel” and pays tribute to influences like Bjork, Patti Smith and Kate Bush.

“The way [Kate Bush] she sings, is just no care,” she explains. “She just goes for it, and that has inspired me a lot vocally and in terms of a performer. There’s no fear there.”

Building off those legendary songwriters, Lights says songs like “How We Do It” try to answer the same question everyone has: Why are we here? What’s our purpose in life? How do we get there? But there’s also a feeling of bursting through difficult times, seeing the good in everything and just being present, particularly on first single “Up We Go.”

“I ended up settling into this frame of mind, especially after becoming a mom, of just happiness,” she says. “Just being happy with where you are and finding out what you do best and doing it and not surrounding yourself in negativity and just enjoying the moment.”

She pauses for a bit and then says, “I look back, and it changed me, making it.”

One of the biggest things Lights says she’s learned from creating Little Machines is that she can’t force her writing. But at the same time, you have to “keep up the muscle,” even when you’re on the road, she says.

“Being a mom makes it harder to find time to write and it gets harder to find time to sit down and do a vocal, because there’s a baby behind you crying,” she says. “But it’s just a different experience of writing.

"It’s more the feeling that there is no pressure to write anything right now. That’s when you feel the most inspired - when you don’t feel like you have to be doing it. It’s like squeezing water from a rock when you feel like you’re forcing it and that’s the arch nemesis of creativity.”

Lights also says all the changes in her life this year have been part of how she’s looking at writing in a different way.

“I think that as you evolve as a person and an artist, your creative process evolves and changes, too,” she says.

“Before for me, just letting a song flow out was fine. Maybe that’s changed for me and I do have to sit down and put attention on it and focus it, and that doesn’t mean you’re forcing it, that just means you’re creating an opportunity for it to come out. I learned that that really does work in a lot of ways.”

Especially if you’re present and fully in the moment.