12 March 2023

12 March 2023 - Lights - Banner

This is the 18th post we've made about Lights on this blog.  That is more than any #WGPHOF member.  That is more than my previous overposting of Charli XCX (17, by the way - 16 by me - if you include this post that totally featured her). 17 of these posts about Lights have been written by me.  

So why so much attention to a shapeshifting, namechanging artist?

Those who have known me for decades could tell you not only what my favorite album was (House Tornado, by Throwing Muses) but my SECOND favorite (Surfer Rosa, by the Pixies).  Since the late 1980s.  No album came close to those two for me.  Perfect albums.  I continually come back to them, for decades.  

Scott Colvin (who I will for this very last time give credit for scooping me on this one and who it's really killing not to post Britney Spears today) knows this. So when he reads the next paragraph he might be floored.

I can't say that anymore. Because over the past two years, I keep coming back to two other not-new albums: Roses by Cœur de Pirate, (by the way, also someone we've posted about no less than 18 times) and Siberia by Lights.  And the latter more than the former. 

(and, by the way, also Little Machines. Two albums now among my favorites)

Is Lights the new Kristin Hersh?  That may be an exaggeration, but the lyrical structure that Lights comes back to, song after song after song, is one that is flexible and hits hard.  This perhaps doesn't resonate more than it does with "Banner" - an uplifting, hopeful, but still dark song.  


I mention flexible.  I chose "Banner" here for a reason.  It was the first acoustic song of hers that I had heard (and I didn't know at the time it was Lights, because had I known, my blind spot would have told me to turn it off).  As of this writing, this version - the acoustic one - is her most played song on Spotify, by far.  
  

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