dEd

Throughout her career, Canadian alt-pop shape-shifter Lights (aka Valerie Poxleitner) has answered her big-bang moments with comedown companions, by releasing entire acoustic revisions of her albums. And while 2022’s *PEP* arrived after a five-year gap between official Lights full-lengths—during which she became the busiest featured vocalist working along the pop-punk-to-EDM spectrum—her penchant for mellow makeovers continues apace with its companion release, *dEd*. Only now, Lights is hanging up her acoustic guitar to chill out in a whole new way. “Everything about *PEP* was extreme and exaggerated,” Lights tells Apple Music. “The excitement, the energy, the colors, the marketing, the humor. It was meant to be a sarcastic and cynical approach to peppy, inspirational music.” So, when it came time to reimagine these tracks, rather than just turn down the volume, she had to completely turn *PEP* on its head—literally. As its title unsubtly illustrates, *dEd* is *PEP* thrust into the Upside Down, presenting the original album’s 13 tracks in reverse order, and dramatically changing the vibe from spring-break beach party to dead-of-winter funeral. “Previously, I’ve always done acoustic \[reworkings\], but I felt like, this time, I had to do something really opposite,” Lights says. “So, I thought, ‘Let’s take the production totally away from the alt-rock thing…and what is the opposite of that? Let’s go electronic, let’s go downtempo, let’s go ambient, let’s go dark.’” Here, Lights takes us on a track-by-track journey into the void. **“Grip”** “With my acoustic stuff, I’m careful to not over-process vocals. So, with *dEd*, I thought, ‘I’m going to process the vocals like I would on an electronic track.’ But when I went to do that, it didn’t match. I love the juxtaposition of having a really raw, acoustic-style vocal over electronic production. There’s something cool about toeing the line with those two styles of production on top of each other. Like on ‘Grip,’ there’s no Auto-Tune. It’s meant to have these curves and flaws and little moments that make it feel real over the perfect electronic production.” **“Voices Carry”** “I ended up taking a more minimal approach overall. On most of the tracks, I tried to put a chillstep-style syncopated bass pattern, with a little bit of wub going on. And I managed to get it into this one, too, but it’s decidedly less chillstep. It’s almost more like a classic Lights acoustic version because this song kind of just commanded that. I thought, ‘Let’s just let “voices carry,” literally.’” **“Okay Okay”** “The lyric for ‘Okay Okay’ has always been really dark: If you completely fall toxically in love with somebody, then they can make you do whatever they want. It’s kind of a heavy concept, and so this version brought all of that darkness out of these lyrics that, typically, people at my shows would be jumping and singing along to. This is a totally different vibe.” **“Easy Money”** “On the original, there’s a down-chorus following the bridge that I’ve always really liked. So, I thought, ‘I’m gonna do a vocoder stack and do my take on an Imogen Heap-style moment.’ So, I spent a lot of time researching vocoder plug-ins and how to use them. But when I really got the track going, my actual vocal takes were cooler than the vocoder itself. In the end, I did layer in a vocoder track as well and just combined it all and created this really special moment.” **“Real Thing”** “Me and Elohim wrote this track \[for *PEP*\], and it was such a good vibe. The hardest part about recutting it was just trying to capture a vibe that was different. Ultimately, the heart of the track is the same—it’s just slower and lower. The sentiment of the lyric remains the same, but I got to put in some cool choppy samples to make a fun, chill version.” **“Sparky”** “Years ago, when Drake dropped *Scorpion*, I covered *Scorpion*’s B-side within a week of it coming out and did a whole acoustic, chill take on the entire project. Of course, it got taken off DSPs almost right away, so it was a lot of work for literally nothing. But I did learn a lot in the process about how to keep a hip-hop flow and lyrical cadence within a low-key production style with the pads and a little bit of a groove. So, all the expertise I gained from covering that project went into this one.” **“Rent”** “There’s a handful of songs on *PEP* that I did all the production on, and my production skills have gotten so much better since then. So, this was a chance for me to have another go at production on ‘Rent’—another way that this might have been manifested on the last album. There’s no right answer for how you complete a song—you’re just winging it every step of the way!” **“Jaws”** “With this one, I went through so many different chord progressions, trying to get a different one from the original, and I finally landed on this really positive-sounding, kind of lullaby-style thing in the verses. And I was like, ‘I’m going to make it cute...and then break into this big drop.’ It’s not necessarily a chill version, but it definitely takes on a new energy and darkness.” **“Money in the Bag”** “I remember hanging out with Kiesza \[who was featured on the original version\] on a trip to LA, and I told her, ‘Man, I do not know how to do this track! Your voice is too good! I can’t sing like that.’ She was like, ‘Huh...I don’t know how to help you. Sorry!’ I ended up taking it into a synth-wave direction and then stripping it back. It took a lot of finessing until I got it to a place I was comfortable, but it turned out way better than expected.” **“Salt and Vinegar”** “This landed in a really vibey chillstep area that I didn’t expect this song to go to, because this is probably the most fun alt-pop song on *PEP*. I love playing this song, and I didn’t want to lose the strong points of the track: the bassline, the guitar part, the spunk. But none of that carried over. Instead, this version is counting on the strength of the lyric itself, and I was really surprised at how much that shone.” **\"Prodigal Daughter”** “This one actually came out when *PEP* first came out, as a bonus track. So, this created the blueprint for the rest of the project. The original is just pure energy and yelling and hollering. So, I did the softest vocal I could, with the most gentle guitar. This was the first real extreme flip, and I just loved how that turned out.” **“In My Head”** “The original is an anthem for running around with confidence, and this suddenly seems like the opposite. The strange thing about the topline on this is that the verses are \[in a\] major \[key\], and the choruses are minor. So, it has a complete sonic shift between those parts, and I didn’t really discover that until I was working on this. I had a lot of fun flipping this into a ’70s-sounding alt-electronic moment. There’s these almost dreamy, trippy chords going into these vinyl-sounding drums. This is the one that stands out the most from the rest of the songs on *dEd*.” **“Beside Myself”** “I noticed there’s a trend in TikTok-style videos where people are pitching things around or speeding them up and making them higher. I thought, ‘How can I take that concept and employ it in a way that doesn’t feel camp but feels true to the song?’ And I thought having the chorus dropping into a pitched vocal would be really cool. I had a lot of fun just trying new production tricks and thinking about ways to drop you into this electronic void.”