Lights

2014 TMA149 Musician of the Year Award Recipient

When Canadian synthpop/electropop musician, singer, and songwriter Lights joined the TMA in 2008, her career as a musician was already well under way. She began her professional career at a very young age, working as a songwriter for Sony Music/ATV Publishing (Canada), signing her first deal at the age of 15. In 2006, Lights relocated to Toronto from her home in Timmins, Ontario, and after two years on the Toronto music scene, she signed a record deal with local indie label Underground Operations and a deal in the U.S. with Warner Bros/Doghouse Records — and she hasn’t looked back since.

In the short span of six years, she has released four full-length albums and one EP. Her debut album, The Listening, earned her the 2009 Juno Award for Best New Artist and was certified as a gold record in November of 2010. Her EP Acoustic was released in 2010, and in 2011 she released the full-length album Siberia (which was nominated for a Juno Award for Best Pop Album of the Year) and was followed by Siberia Acoustic in 2013. In 2014, she recorded and released her most recent album, Little Machines.

A true pioneer of the modern music business paradigm, Lights has built her following and fan base by using technology and social media to her advantage. She spent the early part of her career sharing her musical creations on the internet, and has developed a very large presence online, with almost 600,000 people following her on Twitter and over 1.1 million “likes” on her Facebook page.

Over the span of her career so far, Lights’ music been played heavily across the country on commercial radio, and she has received numerous accolades, nominations, and awards, toured extensively in the U.S. and Canada, and is currently signed to Universal Music Canada and Warner Bros Records in the U.S. This year, she won for the 2014 Juno for Pop Album of the year for Little Machines. In celebration of her success to date and her Juno Award win, the Toronto Musicians’ Association is honoured to announce Lights as 2014 TMA Musician of the Year.

An artist and musician whose career trajectory continues to climb, Lights has come a long way since starting out as a musician in high school playing guitar and singing in a heavy metal band. We look forward to seeing where this exciting young artist’s work will take her in the years ahead.