Lights

Lights (born Valerie Poxleitner in 1987) – a Canadian synth pop singer-songwriter, best known for her songs "February Air", "White", "Drive My Soul", and "The Last Thing On Your Mind", featured in 2008 Old Navy video commercials.

Her live band comprises:

Adam Weaver on synthesizers,
Maurie Kaufmann (ex-BOY, ex-the 6ixty8ights) on drums.
Lights is managed by Canadian musician and radio personality Jian Ghomeshi.

Compared to Vanessa Carlton for her high-toned, soft voice, Lights is one of several new female singers coming to fore in the late 2000s. This list includes the likes of Kate Voegele, Katy Perry and Tristan Prettyman. All of them, Lights included, style themselves after the 1980s New Wave singers and 1990s feminist singer-songwriters, therefore setting the stage for the return in force and by popular choice of melodious pop music, in place of the hip-hop or rap, which has largely monopolized the pop landscape so far this century.

Behind the scenes, Lights has been hired to write songs and texts for the television series Instant Star, together with other skilled songwriters and musicians. They work as a team. Lights and Luke McMaster are credited with composing "Perfect", sung in the role of Jude Harrison on the show by Alexz Johnson. The song is a not-so-subtle musical allusion to "Penny Lane", written by Paul McCartney for The Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band as a counterpoint to John Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever", but withheld, and actually only released on the Magical Mystery Tour album. Luke McMaster's and Valerie Poxleitner's "Perfect" (she is credited like so on the soundtrack CD, and it is she, who sings it on this issue, not Alexz Johnson) also borrows rhythmically from the familiar Welcome Back, Kotter TV theme. So much borrowing in one song gives a new meaning to "synth" in "synth pop", but Lights says she knows what she's doing, relying on her "pretty intense cheese-o-meter" to walk the path true and narrow.