Shining a Light on Bright Light Bright Light

“I am a gay man, but I live in a queer space,” says Rod Thomas, the artist better known as Bright Light Bright Light. “I identify as a gay man because I came out as gay and I sleep with men. But I definitely exist in what would be considered a queer music space.”

That queer music space, in which he has been creating for over a decade, is all the better for his presence. A native of Wales who, for years, has called New York City his home, Thomas is a fixture on the scene, and even has a regular gig — when he’s not producing music — DJing at Club Cumming, the nightspot co-owned by fellow LGBTQ luminary, actor Alan Cumming.

Thomas is also a fixture on X, where his posts run the gamut, from sharing blunt opinions about transphobic celebrities to serving up warm, cozy moments from his home life, particularly as they relate to his gorgeous orange cat, Sunny, who a few weeks after our interview, was diagnosed with heart disease. Thomas, bonding with cat owners everywhere, shared his frustration with giving Sunny his medications, and, while not outwardly grim or self-pitying, has been frank about the reality that his cherished companion may not be with him for much longer.

“Little guy has heart disease and prognosis is poor,” he recently tweeted. “He’s on meds, but also reticent to take them, so I’m doing what I can as well as I can and being there for him knowing we have [an] uncertain length [and] limited time left. He’s my favourite living thing.”

The outpouring from fans and followers has been overwhelming, to say the least, with many purchasing merchandise, including a “Sunny The Cat Unisex T-Shirt,” at brightlightx2.bigcartel.com to help cover Sunny’s mounting medical expenses.

A master at the smiling, playfully sexy selfie, Thomas, with his silken baritone, and skill at crafting catchy, earworm melodies, is a standard bearer of musical elation, which he admits is his intent. Life is hard enough as it is, he reckons, so why not provide the world with a fresh breeze of kindness and joy?

Ironically, Thomas’s side passion is horror films. He’s partial to Italian Giallos, a genre typified by its boldly saturated colors and bizarre narratives.

“They’re just kind of trashy, weird Italian horror films from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, with slutty and wild, crazy storylines, but with strong, fabulous women and really beautiful interiors,” he says. “The soundtracks for those films are often really lush and really intricate, and were done by incredible composers.” His favorite of the genre is Mario Bava’s classic Blood & Black Lace.

Bright Light Bright Light is currently doing short bursts of mini-tours to promote his latest album, Enjoy Youth, something he was unable to do with 2020’s Fun City, as the pandemic shuttered the world, preventing any in-person encounters. The experience has been liberating for him, to once again see live audiences react to his music. Of course, audience adulation is a familiar feeling for an artist who once opened for Elton John and Cher. (He’ll bring the Enjoy Youth tour to D.C.’s Pie Shop on Oct. 20.)

Enjoy Youth is a stunning piece of work, a celebratory callback to the origins of dance music. The record serves as a satisfying journey through historic touchstones, as well as a way forward.

“The intention was to pay homage to a lot of the types of songwriting and production that really gave me a lot of joy when I was growing up,” says Thomas. “But also what was really important for me was to work with people from that period of time — like getting Ultra Naté, Beth Hirsch, and Richard X on the record. A lot of people are sampling artists from back in the day, but I was like, ‘Well, they’re still working and they’re still alive and they still sound great, so why not just get them on the album?’ I really, really enjoyed that process of bringing my past joy into my present joy.”

METRO WEEKLY: I’d like to start with your childhood growing up in Wales. Tell me about your early years.

ROD THOMAS: It was — oh, God — just a very different life. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, so it was very calm and very quiet, which is what I think drew me to cinema and the radio and media outlets. I was just so intrigued by the bright lights of cinema and different music styles on the radio. So I think I’ve always been very intrigued by these things that kind of broke the silence that was around me.

I think it was good to grow up somewhere where it was very peaceful and very pretty, but it gave me something to aim for. I’m very glad that I didn’t grow up somewhere like New York or London, where you had everything at your doorstep. It was healthy to have the desire to make you want to travel and want to explore different places. I’m very grateful for that.

And Wales is an amazing country, so I’m very glad to come from there, as well. I just don’t really think of it as my life now. It just doesn’t really feel like the same universe even. It’s so bizarre.

MW: I have a Welsh friend who showed me pictures of where he grew up, and it was just gorgeous, unlike anything I’ve seen. It’s almost magical over there.

THOMAS: It’s a very different climate. The weather is so different. We have these amazing beaches and we have crazy forests and stuff like that. It’s a really incredible place and I really appreciate it more when I go back now versus living there. There was such an itch to leave when I was younger because I could see the limitations. And now, being able to visit it, I have a completely different perspective. And am able to see just how amazing of a place it is.

MW: Did your parents encourage you to be creative?

THOMAS: I don’t think they actively encouraged it, but they were very encouraging whenever they saw me doing something creative. I’m lucky that where I’m from in Wales, it was very common in school to be encouraged to play an instrument. So music has always been a part of my life, and I think my parents were very happy that I was doing something like that instead of going out and smashing up cars or whatever people do.

MW: What was your first instrument?

THOMAS: The recorder, which is kind of everyone’s first. It was like the cheapest instrument, and in school you had to play that if you wanted to do an instrument. And once you did that, they kind of let you then upgrade to the instrument of choice. My first proper instrument was the flute.

Later, it was the guitar. It was just cooler to play a guitar. I studied piano lessons and I just really sucked at them. I picked up the guitar because I was listening to lots of bands at the time that were guitar-based. And it just felt like that was the cool thing to do — and I was trying to be cool. [Laughs.]

I started writing songs on the guitar. And then, when I started writing songs sort of properly, at around 13 or 14, and wanted to be able to do little demos of things, I understood that you could use an electronic keyboard to do different sounds like strings and drums and synth pads. So I taught myself how to use the keyboard and really fell in love with the piano in a way that I never had before. And that became my primary instrument. So that is my primary instrument now, much more than the guitar. I haven’t picked up my guitar for years, to be honest. It’s weird how it will shift like that.

MW: You started composing so young.

THOMAS: I did really enjoy the composition process. I have a ring binder of all of these hundreds and hundreds of songs that I wrote when I was 13 and 14. Some of the songs from my youth, I still have in my canon. When I did a reissue of the first album a couple of years ago for its 10th anniversary, there was one song on there that I wrote when I was 17 that I just played to death for such a long time. When I was singing on the subway in London, I used to play that song over and over and over. And people really loved it. It made me a lot of money.

For this Enjoy Youth album cycle, the bonus edition has four songs that I wrote when I was twenty. It’s been interesting to revisit songs now that I wrote when I was much, much, much younger. Some of them, honestly, I’m still really proud of. Some of them are fucking useless. But it’s nice that you can hear like, “Wow, I really was onto something with that song” and it took a long time to get from there to where I am now. But it is kind of cool to go back and see the breadcrumbs of that journey through some of the songwriting.

I remember my guitar teacher, when I was 15, just really didn’t like the songs that I was writing. He was just like, “These are no good at all.” A year later I entered one of my songs into a local radio competition and I got radio play. I was so happy that I proved him wrong. That was my real first moment of like, “Oh wow, maybe this is something I’m good at.”

But I never thought that this could be my career. Where I’m from, people don’t do stuff like this as a job. Mostly people have some kind of normal, understandable job and they make music as a hobby that can have varying degrees of success. So I never thought that this would be my job. I thought this would always just be the pleasure side of my life alongside an actual career. So it’s crazy to me that I’ve ended up here.

MW: One thing in your career path blows my mind. I find it extraordinary that Elton John appears with you on several of your songs. One of the world’s biggest superstars. That must be an amazing feeling.

THOMAS: It’s still very surreal. It’s almost more surreal now, ten years on, than it was at the time. Because I think at the time you don’t really have the chance to process it. You just kind of go along with it. And now it feels so crazy that it even happened because it’s just a normal part of my discourse now.

We email all the time and he’s just a friend. But it’s so surreal to think that that became my life. That’s why I don’t really think about my childhood as the same life as the one that I have now, because it just doesn’t feel like the same universe that I was living in. It just feels like all of the things that I’ve done since childhood, or since putting out the first album, they didn’t exist in the reality that I thought I could possibly have growing up. It just feels so surreal to think of myself as the same person in both different realities.

MW: So what is Elton John like?

THOMAS: He’s amazing. He’s really just so fucking amazing. It’s well documented how much philanthropy and how much advocacy he does for his AIDS charity and for other LGBTQ+ artists. He is just the biggest music fan in the world. He loves music, he loves discovering new music. He loves uplifting people that he thinks are talented and that are working hard, and he’s just very kind and really, really, really fucking funny. He’s really one of the funniest people that I’ve met in my whole life, and he doesn’t always know how hilarious he is. He’s a real joy to be around. I’m forever grateful that I get to live in the same timeline as him and that I get to have private moments with him as well as public moments. It’s a gift that the universe has given me that I truly can’t believe is real.

MW: The gift for us are the tracks he appears with you on. They’re so good, especially “All in the Name,” which is just wonderful.

THOMAS: Thank you. There was never a day that I’ve been alive that he was not on the radio and that I accidentally heard him, let alone chose to listen to him. So to have somebody whose voice you’ve heard in every foreseeable living day of your life be on a song that you’ve written is absolutely wild.

MW: You opened for him on part of the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road Tour. You also opened for Cher as well. So I naturally have to now ask: what is she like?

THOMAS: I didn’t spend much time with her, to be honest, but she was very sweet and just her whole team was so lovely. The really nice thing about doing shows with stars like Elton and Cher is that all of the people that travel with them are so kind and so helpful and so warm and so brilliant.

It’s such a different level of touring from when you do more independent venues and stuff, where everything feels like kind of a struggle. It can be really hard to get things done, and there are just so many variables all the time. And then you go into an arena like that and everyone is just so calm and so collected because they’re well-respected by the people that employ them, and everyone’s working as a proper unit. It’s amazing to slide into that world and just see how joyful live music can be. So I’m forever grateful to Cher and her team for taking me on the road. And watching her night after night was just delicious. Brilliant.

MW: I envy you. I want your life.

THOMAS: My life has been so surreal and I’m very grateful for it. And God knows what will happen in the next ten years or whatever of the career. But yeah, it’s been pretty strange so far.

MW: Next time you’re chatting with Elton, please tell him, “Metro Weekly would love to have you on the cover.“

THOMAS: [Laughs.] I’ll see what I can do.

MW: Although, I’m such a longtime fan, I honestly would be too nervous to interview him. I wouldn’t know what to say.

THOMAS: The difference between his career and something like mine is that he was making music at a time when people put out multiple albums a year. So the pace between records was very different. Right now it’s a couple of years between the albums.

MW: That’s very true. Elton John put out 6 albums between 1970 and 1973 alone. Why did things change?

THOMAS: Well, from my personal experience, I pay for everything. So I have to save up for years to put an album out. I don’t know if that’s a depressing answer, but it costs a lot of money to put an album out.

MW: I remember you once put out a tweet where you called yourself a small business owner. And I’d never thought of musicians that way, but it’s true.

THOMAS: It is at once satisfying, depressing, exhausting, uplifting, rewarding, and crushing. I said something along those lines when I first started making music, and I was slammed for that by somebody — I can’t remember who — for making it sound like really uncool and really corporate. And I’m like, “I think you completely misunderstood the point that I’m talking about long-term survival as a creative, where you have to be smart about things and you have to be realistic about stuff.”

You can be ambitious and you can aim for things, but you have to understand that not everything works and not everything is going to reap the rewards that you hope it does. And I don’t know if the person who clapped back at me came from extreme privilege, where money was just not an issue to them, but not all of us come from families that have banks of cash where you can just keep making whatever the fuck you want and it doesn’t matter if it works or not.

For someone like me, and many, many, many other artists who don’t have a label or funding behind them, but really just are making music and are in that world, you have to work out how to make the funds that you do have go as far as possible. There’s things that you can’t do and there’s things that the money is better spent on and not better spent on.

You have to think about profit, loss, sustainability, that kind of stuff. And that is running a business. So is running a coffee shop or making artwork for people, or whatever — it doesn’t matter what the output is. You have to think about it, like, “Can I afford to keep doing it?” And if you are lucky enough that it doesn’t matter, great for you, but that’s not everyone’s reality.

MW: What is a musician’s source of revenue at this point in the industry? Is it touring?

THOMAS: That depends, because it costs a lot of money to do shows. So do you go and do a show where three people are going to come? Probably not, because you’re going to lose money getting there. You’re not going to make any money from it. So when people are like, “Why aren’t you coming to Louisville, Kentucky?” I’m like, “Because three people will come and it will cost me $1,000 to get there and I’ll make about $32.”

As much as I would love to be playing in lots of places and I would love to connect with people in smaller towns that I have never been to, I can’t afford to do it. So you have to be realistic about where you can actually sell tickets and you can break even at the very least.

But there are a lot of income streams. For me it’s like DJ gigs, co-writing, producing for other people, playing instruments for other people, doing live shows, putting out physical records. I do have a big buying fan base, so I do make money from records. Not a phenomenal amount of money, but they break even.

It’s spinning lots and lots and lots of plates which is very tiring and very stressful. But it’s also very rewarding because it means you’re never really bored because you can’t really stop.

So there are lots of income streams and it’s about working out which ones work best for you. Some people, touring is the thing for them, and they get people all across the world going. It doesn’t matter if they sell records or not, they’ll have a live fan base. I’m somewhere between all of these places where I have to be very careful about what I do to make sure that I’m not losing money on stuff.

MW: Do the streaming services frustrate you for that reason?

THOMAS: It’s a love-hate relationship. They definitely help you find an audience that you wouldn’t without them, that’s definitely true. But it is frustrating how little you earn from them. At the same time, you’re not paying for it and you’re still earning something from it. I don’t know — it’s just the way things are now and I think you have to find a way to make peace with that. I’m very happy that people are streaming songs of mine. I am under no illusion that that’s where my income is going to come from. I’m just very grateful that I also have people who buy my records.

MW: You have your own label, right?

THOMAS: I have my own label, yeah.

MW: Why did you make that decision? Why aren’t you with a larger label?

THOMAS: Because no one’s ever wanted to sign me.

MW: Why do you think that is?

THOMAS: I don’t know, love. If I knew that, I would be signed. No one has ever wanted to sign me.

MW: That makes absolutely no logical sense whatsoever. How could a record company not want you on their roster? Would you like to be signed?

THOMAS: I would like to work with a team that believes in what I do. I’m very open to working with the right team, let’s just put it that way.

 

MW: Let’s talk about Enjoy Youth, which is, start to finish, incredible. It literally exudes joy. That sounds really corny, but that’s how it made me feel. Was that your intention with this album?

THOMAS: That was the intention because, honestly, I haven’t felt amazing since COVID. So it was really about making a record that helped me to find the joy in life again. And to remind other people too.

A lot of people in my orbit have struggled a bit, since COVID, to bounce back. Because our careers and our worlds were shaken a lot by all the closures and everything that went on. It’s a record for people to think about the amazing things in life again and how much fun you can have, how much joy you can find in your days. That was the intention, so I’m very glad that it translated.

MW: Let’s talk about Sunny briefly. Sunny is a lifesaver for you.

THOMAS: He’s amazing. Actually, I’m playing with him right now. He’s just come to sit with me while we’re doing the interview. Yeah, he’s really the best. He’s such an amazing little strange and weird man, but I fell very in love with him.

MW: How did he come into your life?

THOMAS: When I got my green card, I thought I could finally get a cat because I was able to stay. I was looking online and he popped up. I wanted to rescue a cat. I actually wanted to get a senior cat, just to take in a cat that was being ignored in a shelter. But he popped up and he had a really sad little story and I just fell in love with his picture. So I went to meet him and he really liked me, so I brought him home.

MW: What was his sad story?

THOMAS: He was dumped in a paint bucket outside the rescue shelter overnight and just left there. And when they found him in the morning, he’d pushed the lid off and it was filling up with rainwater and he was just really scared. So he had a really rough couple of months. I think he was there for three months when they were trying to give him behavioral therapy so he could not be as violent, and start to trust people, and no one went to see him. And I think I was the first person that went to see him. And just before I went in to see him, he kind of turned a corner, and we just had a real connection and he’s amazing. I love him.

MW: He seems particularly just in love with you.

THOMAS: He has his moments. He’s a funny little man. He’s not a lap cat, he’s not a snuggler at all, but he definitely loves his attention when he wants it. And I think he does love me. I think he is also a very independent person, so I kind of have learned to understand his little declarations of love when they come. He’s sweet and he is a very complicated cat.

MW: What’s your next project?

THOMAS: I’m not thinking about the next project. I’m thinking about this project, and I’m really just working out how I can take this album around and connect with people and see people from a stage in real life with this album, which I didn’t get to do for the last album campaign because of COVID. So that’s going to be the focus for a while, which is really nice. The reaction to the album has been amazing, and I’m really excited to see how it can live and grow in a live space.

It’s been so thrilling and so rewarding in a way that just getting online reactions can never be. Even the week after the album came out, having people singing the lyrics back at you, like “How the hell do you know the song so quickly?” [Laughs.] And it just felt so electric. It really reminded me which was the intention of the album, that life can be really joyful and really uplifting. And it was exactly the feeling that I was hoping to get from putting this album out, and it feels just amazing to have that already. So, yeah, it bodes well.

MW: Final question: What gives Bright Light, Bright Light joy?

THOMAS: Kindness. I think the really lovely thing that I’ve managed to do with my music is create communities that are kind and loving and respectful to each other. So when I go do my shows and I see people chatting and making friends and looking out for each other, that makes me feel very proud.

I feel very proud of the DJ sets that I do every week at Club Cumming that bring together people that make friends and make little groups that come back with each other. To make a community and to see people being just kind and fun with each other makes me very proud. I hope that the album reminds people about the power of kindness, and I’m looking forward to just feeling that kindness around me, which I didn’t get to do with the last album. So kindness gives me joy.

Stream or purchase Enjoy Youth at www.brightlightx2.com.

Follow Bright Light Bright Light on X at @brightlightx2.

Bright Light Bright Light will appear at the D.C.’s Pie Shop, 1339 H St. NE, on Sunday, Oct. 20. Tickets are $15. Visit www.pieshopdc.com.