First Play Live: Lights, Skin and Earth Acoustic
Lights performs tracks off her new self-produced, mixed and engineered album
Lights' talents and interests span many media and genres. With her latest album, Skin and Earth Acoustic, she's exploring another facet of the crossover album/comic book series she created in 2017, when she published a 170-page, six-issue companion comic book series for her album Skin and Earth.
With Skin and Earth Acoustic, Lights dives into the many environments referenced in her songs and comic books. She recorded the bulk of the sessions on location — outside of the traditional recording studio — in places like the wide-open flats of California's Death Valley, the reverberant tunnel in Vasquez Rocks, inside a truck cab and even under the rain.
Lights also produced, engineered and mixed the album herself.
"I did most of it except master and I will shout-out Aya Merrill who is out of New York, I believe, and killed the mastering job!" Lights told CBC Music. "And I'm saying this because women behind the scenes in music in production and mastering, mixing all that we need to give them, hire them, and we need to shout them out. So that we can close the gap, because 98 per cent of producers are male and 97 per cent of engineers are male. So that's part of my MO with this whole project is making sure if I'm bringing people in, I want them to be women. And she nailed it."
For this First Play Live session in studio 211 — and for her Skin and Earth Acoustic tour — Lights has added a string section (violin, viola and cello). As you'll see and hear, Kevin Fox's arrangements are an evocative and moving addition.
Watch and listen to Lights performs these songs from Skin and Earth Acoustic, for the first time ever, below.
