LIGHTS on Mushrooms and Music and Living Life to the Fullest

June 12, 2025

By Karen Bliss

There aren’t too many artists like LIGHTS, someone with such self-knowing coupled with an acute creative vision that their art serves a personal purpose to let them make sense of some tough stuff and relish in the good stuff. Then, she releases it and finds that we too can relate to a lot of what she’s processed and put in her songs. 

The four-time Juno Award-winning pop singer, songwriter, producer, director and comic book artist — whose songs have racked up close to a half-million streams — is on her sixth full-length studio album now, simply titled A6.  

In the thank you section of the liner notes, the BC-based artist writes, “I would be amiss to not acknowledge all the ups and downs I’ve faced over the last few years. This is an album about love and grief and looking back. It’s about getting to a point in life where you can see the past with new eyes. This is about recognizing the complicated flawed thing you’ve become and settling into it, scrapes and all, because you know where they came from. A6 is for screaming the words you never thought you’d say out loud. So I hope you feel found in some of these songs, or at the very least, it can take you away for a little while.”

Karen Bliss spoke to LIGHTS about all these things and more, from performing for Sarah McLachlan at the 2024 Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame to “the career of my dreams.”

Before we talk about A6, I wanted to ask you about performing for Sarah McLachlan’s induction into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame last September. Did you watch the clip afterwards? She is sitting in the audience with her daughter, beaming. 

I watched it all. It was so, so, so cool. That was a core memory, for sure, because I brought my dad and It was very special. It’s a very special night to be part of. I felt like these are legacy Canadian icons and I was able to sit among them.

The story you told onstage about being in grade 9 and having very few friends until you sang a Sarah McLachlan song in front of your high school, had you told that story before and that’s why you were asked to do it? 

No, they didn’t know the story when they asked me to do it. but they were like, ‘Do you have any anecdotes?” “Uh, yeah, actually, an integral part.” I mean, I’m sure she’s an integral part of a lot of people’s lives in other ways and that was my version of it.

Did you get to connect with her after?

Yeah, I was downstairs sitting with Metric and we were just about to go live on this interview, and then Sarah scooched in and we were all together.  I was sandwiched between Sarah and Metric, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, my younger self who was just trying to start writing music is just losing her mind right now.’ It was really special. 

It’s been 15 years since your debut album [2009’s The Listening], 16 for your EP, and you’re still young [38]. Over half your life you’ve been making music. 

Yeah. Over half my life.  I’ve been professionally making music longer than I haven’t and making music in life for most of my life at this point. it’s just part of my being.

This album resonated with me. I don’t want to ask you anything too personal, but in the liner notes you write that “This album is about love and grieving and looking back.”

Ask me anything.

What made you, at this stage of your life, start looking back and reflecting?

There’s so many movements in life that lead you to where you are. It’s a combination of these incredible, beautiful memories and these incredibly dark times too. And, in the last five years, I’ve experienced what I like to call the full range. And that actually makes life so beautiful. I lost someone really close to me who was a creative partner. That was really hard, as the first time I really felt that type of pain before, which is a different kind of pain. And then, I dealt with pulling myself out of a really dark place emotionally where some nights you just find yourself literally on the bathroom floor. ‘I need to come out of this.’

And so, worked on myself with counseling and multiple mushroom microdose regimens and being proactive about looking inward and identifying where your heart’s at, and trying to be the most whole version of the person that you want to be. You can’t be a whole person without those hard things, shifting relationships. As a mother of a growing kid, there’s so much to be experienced in life and I have been immersing myself in all of it. I think, also, the discovery of ‘I’m living my dream.’ I have the career of my dreams in that I want to squeeze every second of joy out of it. So, I bring my friends with me wherever I go. I make every moment rich so that I get to never have this moment of resentment towards any of the things that I have surrounded myself with.

I always envy artists that they have somewhere to channel both difficult and beautiful moments in life, particularly grief.

I’ve just enjoyed so much out of life over the last few years and that comes with all the pain that I’ve experienced and got to put that into all these songs. “Alive Again” is about that feeling of recognizing the bigger picture when you’ve hit rock bottom and knowing that that moment can take you there. You can’t really find the beauty unless you experienced the darkness of it. “Damage” is a little bit about that too. 

There’s a bunch of other music on the record that are about that proximity to the other side. There’s a song called “Day Two” and a song called “The Other Side of the Door,” where there’s this veil between us and this other realm that is so glaring and so close, but we always don’t want to look at it because it’s so hard to imagine it being real, but it’s real. So, how do you come to terms with the fragility of life and just milk every minute? Because this is all we got. 

It can’t be easy processing and distilling down such big emotions into a lyric.

Yeah. Well, one of the things I’ve learned about experiencing any strong emotion is allowing yourself to experience it and just live in it and let your body and mind process it. That’s what songwriting does, or art, for a lot of people, but it has to be processed. You have to acknowledge it and let yourself feel it.

I think a lot of people push that down or push it away and don’t want to identify it or do everything they can in their life, make all their decisions, based on avoiding pain — when it just needs to be experienced and processed. And that, for me, is done multiple ways. Music is one of them, where you just sit and you feel it and you let it exist, and let it turn into whatever it’s going to turn into, but you can’t sit there and process it forever. You’ve got to let it happen, and then go through the other side.

No one can shut you up when you process your emotions in art. When you are grieving, often people only give you a certain amount of time to talk about it, then you have to keep it inside because it makes people uncomfortable. But in music, you can process it and sing it and keep feeling it and your fans appreciate it and use it to help them, and you, when you perform it, can “keep talking about it,” in essence, for years to come without someone thinking, “Get over it, already.”

We all, more or less, have our versions of the same experiences in life. We all eventually lose people. We all have struggles with our mental wellness. We all want the most out of life. There’s so many parallel experiences. And, there is something so cool about being able to put that into a song that people can connect with because I think there’s this part of our brain that can only be accessed certain ways, and, for me, that’s mushrooms [laughs] and music.

Genuinely, there’s an aspect of our brains that we don’t understand yet. And we don’t understand why, when we listen to certain things, it scratches that part of your brain. That’s even a saying: “Man, that scratches my brain in a way I can’t explain.” There’s parts of our brain that only music can reach. So, if you can feel understood or heard by what you’re listening to, and it helps you process or access those feelings, there’s nothing but great things that can come from that. 

“White Paper Palm Trees” is obviously looking back with little nods to your early self [‘’Call back to “February Air,” she sings, a reference to her 2009 single, which first appeared on her 2008 self-titled EP, then the lines, “Hand it to myself/ I’m better / Better than ever now I swear”]. Was that one of the more fun pieces to write?

Yeah. That one, a lot of people have hit me up, “Is it about this? or is it about this?” One of my girlfriends was like, “Is this about the music industry?’ And, I’m like, ‘You know what? It could be.”   I use it as a saying now, ‘That’s my white paper palm tree.’ It’s the thing that you have compartmentalized and folded up and positioned in the foreground as what you want it to be, whether that’s really what it is or not; we all set up our little white paper palm trees of all of our experiences. In my case, what I wrote that song about, it was an ex-boyfriend years ago that came out of the woodwork years later. And he did kind of break my heart back in the day, but I was so young, it didn’t matter. But he came out of the woodwork years later and thought all my music was about him [laughs].

I do get that from that lyric actually, but I thought, “Really, is that what it’s about? Is it that…

It’s that cut and dry. I just was like, “Why did you come and change where I positioned you in my life? Because you were so cool and I loved you so much and you were all these firsts for me, and now you’re coming back and messing up the way that I folded you up and put you away. Just stay there, please. That’s the part of you I want to remember.” Sometimes people come in and disturb where you’ve compartmentalized them and there’s actually just so much beauty in that — and I got a song out of it.

Many of the people on your team have been with you for a very long time and you appear very much in control of all aspects of your work from the music videos and comic books to the actual timelines of creating music, side projects, releasing music. That’s a gift in this industry, when other people are relying on you.

It’s the absolute coolest. I feel every year I gain a little bit more control of the vision and the narrative. Early on, I was the creative force, and I did so much stuff. But I think I relied on so many other things to tell me what to do because I didn’t understand the industry and I felt like I was being pulled around. I remember writing a song [2011’s “Heavy Rope”] and there was a lyric “strange hands taking my wrist again.” I remember at one point my TM [tour manager] grabbed my wrist and was pulling me to an interview or something and I just remember at that point going, “I would love to not feel pulled in any direction. I would love to be the one at the front, deciding what happens,” and I can safely say now, at this point in my career — it’s taken years, and it’s taken a lot of understanding and self-work and self-worth to get here — but now I have the absolute vision for it.

And I have the trust in myself to make those decisions. I think it takes a long time and a lot of experience to trust your instincts, and just go with what you think is right. There’s years that I’m like, “That would be a cool idea, but I don’t know if that’s possible. I’m not going to bring it up.” The comic was a big moment like that, for me, where it was like, “I’d love to make a comic, but I’m not a comic artist. What am I? What am I thinking?’ And then you realize, “Oh, I’m my own worst enemy here. I’m the only one who said I can’t do that.” I didn’t say it out loud, so I’m like, “Okay, you know what, I’m gonna say it out loud. I’m gonna make a comic to go with this.” And then I was like, “Oh, I have to do it now.”

Sometimes, you just have to push yourself to realize these dreams, then you realize your capabilities. So, yeah, first time in my career, I have full absolute control. I make all the visuals and videos with my husband, Beau [Bokan] and I edit them all. And while it’s a lot more of a workload, it’s completely my vision. It’s amazing, I’ll close my eyes and I’ll process what I think this song should look like and then I come up with the plan, put it into action. And product is in front of me, I’m editing it, and it looks exactly like I pictured. That’s never happened before until this whole project. So, it’s amazing to see all the years of experience pay off. 

A6 is the first album you’ve produced all yourself.

And I just did it. Mostly at home.  I went to LA to track guitar and drums with my band, and then finished it in Berlin. “I can make this wherever I want. I don’t have to go into a stagnant studio that I don’t think is a very creative environment, just because that’s the way I’ve done in the past and that’s the way people do it. I’m going get an Airbnb in Berlin, and drink wine with my friend and then work on music.” And you realize, it doesn’t matter. I remember hearing Brian Eno, he produced Viva La Vida by Coldplay and they just went to a bakery and turned it into a studio.There’s no rules. You can actually make music wherever you want. But I didn’t know that years ago. I just thought I guess this is how music gets made, in studios. Now, I see you can make it wherever and as long as the vision’s there, and the skillset is there, you can make something great.

What is it about Berlin that feeds your creativity?

I love Germany as a whole, but if you talk to any German that doesn’t live in Berlin, they don’t really like Berlin because it’s different from the rest of Germany. But one cool thing about Berlin is it’s very artsy; there’s a lot of artistic type of people. And so you get to be in a place where everybody already a little bit off the beaten trail from what’s normal. It doesn’t feel like a finance city; it feels like an artistic place where people can express. And there’s just such a great music scene. There’s this dark wave uprising, but then you go to the clubs, and you just experience techno for 10 hours. I don’t make techno, but I can enjoy that and you just immerse yourself. And then, everything is covered in graffiti. But then there’s parks, and everything is really eco-friendly. So this there’s this dichotomy of old grungy art meets like forward-thinking nature and climate love. And it feels a little bit of what I pull from for all my experiences in my music making — I live in the bush; I live in the forest; half our house is off the grid, yet the other foot is in dirty clubs and bus bathrooms when I’m touring with my music. So, it’s a balance of both.

Are the wheels spinning for another comic book? 

I definitely want to make a second arc to the comic. It’s actually written and I’ve been starting to draw them. It is something that’s been pushed to the back burner for now because I felt with A6, I’m just gonna get back to the heart of where I started in music. It’s just making the music and touring it and putting all the emphasis on the music. The last two records, especially [2017’s] Skin & Earth and [2022’s] Pep, it was all about the show of it and connecting it with multimedia and integrating that into the live show and exaggerating a product because that was really fun, especially with Pep.  But with A6, it’s the opposite of all that. This is just music. This is back to roots. This is all of my experiences, everything I’ve learned just shown through the music and the music taking the lead. It’s the first time I’ve actually done that in a while. Usually, there’s all these other nerdy components. And despite a visual that connects, and I can put my aesthetic interests into those videos, it’s really just about the music at heart with this one.

And, just curious, the “Intro” to A6, is that your dad?

No, it was a combination of very pivotal, cool moments, whether those were pulled from audio or videos. There’s one clip of me in the background going, “That’s why I’m best inside,” which is really bad German grammar for “That was the best time.” I was coming out of a Berlin club at eight in the morning and it’s just little moments that were so cool to be part of the record. That quote where the guy goes, “Every day you wake up to give music to people because this is your gift,” I was flying out of Porter [Billy Bishop Airport] in Toronto on tour. I had a show for my side project [LŪN], and it was terrible weather and they canceled our flight. So, they gave us a voucher to go to Pearson [Airport]. So, we get in this cab and it was a long drive and we’re heading to Pearson to try to make this other flight and the cab driver was full of wisdom. He was saying these beautiful things, so I started recording.  I was like, “I’m loving this conversation” and that was a soundbite from me telling him my story. And he just said that. And I was like, ‘That’s the most beautiful thing.’  It really aligned with the whole point of the record, which is, ‘This is what I do. This is what I can give. It’s all I can give, but I can give it. So here we are.’