Why Lights walked away from religion

31:30Why Lights walked away from religion

Back in the late-aughts, Lights exploded onto the Canadian music scene with her debut studio album, The Listening. Around the same time, she also started questioning her faith.

Born to missionary parents in Timmins, Ont., Lights was homeschooled in a religious family, believing that her musical ability was both a gift from God as well as a responsibility.

"We did missionary training in Jamaica and then spent years growing up in the Philippines," she says in an interview with Q's Tom Power. "I can talk about it comfortably now because we've all deconstructed out of religion. It's a big journey. I think at a young age, when you're raised religious, you are not necessarily afforded critical thought and I had resentment for a lot of years."

Today, Lights doesn't assign blame to her parents or anyone else for the way she was raised. As she grew older and her music career started to take off, she started thinking more critically about organized faith and her life's purpose. 

"You start to question things," she says. "You start questioning your autonomy. You want to make decisions for yourself. And so for the last 15 years of my life, I deconstructed out of all of those belief systems, and that included stripping away what I perceived to be my purpose in life. Because I think it's easy for some people to look at religion and see all the answers. It gives them their path, so you don't have to come up with that yourself."

Lights acknowledges that her religious upbringing also had a positive impact on her songwriting and artistry.

"To be honest, I learned a lot from the worship element of it," she tells Power. "When I first learned chords, I would go, 'OK, here's a song that you can play in front of the church that's easy to remember.' And that's really parallel with a catchy song."

While many tracks off The Listening could be interpreted as religious songs, such as Saviour and Drive My Soul, Lights says it wasn't necessarily her intention to make Christian music. Rather, her goal was to "bring positivity to the world." But first she had to look inward and rebuild her sense of self.

"[Drive My Soul] is so special and so close to my heart," she says. "That whole writing process was such a haven for me in that time because it was, like I said, me pursuing my dreams but having a lot of issues at the same time, and struggling with trying to solve my issues with religion. And it didn't solve anything. You try to do all this prayer and ultimately you just have to really look inward and work on yourself — and that takes years."

Lights is now back with a new album, A6, which is out everywhere now.

The full interview with Lights is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Lights produced by Liv Pasquarelli.