Best of Month: AotY #13: Lights' "Pep" via Fueled by Ramen / Elektra

Lights had one of the earliest AsterTracks episodes this year because for the first time in my life I loved a record she put out. That hadn’t been true for any other year before, I always really hated her music as a high schooler and when I loved “Prodigal Daughter” as much as I did last year I knew Pep was the perfect time for a redemption story.


Not on her end, I mean on mine.


In that episode I recounted a story about how I told Lights to her face that her music was bad at a Warped Tour date when I was fifteen. I was not ready to go into the full extent of what that truly meant at the time. This is no excuse - but at age fifteen I was depressed, angry and felt so alone in the world in general. My parents marriage was unraveling, I was living real day-to-day sexual assault and on top of it all I had realized I was trans. I wouldn’t even begin to transition for eleven years but maybe that was all the time I needed. “Prodigal Daughter” changed something in me and while it took a progression of a year or two to really sink in for both me and the angry fifteen year old I used to be. It talked about femininity in a way that was divine, something we could embrace and use for comfort and inner peace. I started to try to see myself in that way. I started to see the woman I could be and not the one the news, my family’s views and the town I was in told me I could be. I started to actualize that and live it and while I haven’t found a perfect version of that maybe I never will. Maybe that’s the point.


So, I’m sorry Lights, but also thank you for putting your own vulnerabilities and how you use them to overcome anything before you out there. It’s informing the woman I want to be and am today.

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