In late 2019, Welsh-born, New York-based electropop artist/DJ/queer humanitarian Bright Light Bright Light, aka Rod Thomas, felt on top of the world. He'd just finished touring Europe with Cher ("That was the gayest thing I've ever done in my whole life — and I've toured with Scissor Sisters and Elton John!" he laughs), and he was prepping his fourth independent album, Fun City, featuring Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears, Erasure's Andy Bell, Sam Sparro, Caveboy, cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond, and Madonna backup singers Niki Haris and Donna De Lory.
And then... COVID-19 hit. And then, Thomas turned 40 during the pandemic. For the first time in his life, he felt depressed about aging and the passage of time.
"That's really the only time in my life that I've really cared about an age, a number. But it wasn't really about the age. It was about what I thought I should have achieved, and was really on track to achieve, and didn't get to achieve because of something that no one could control," Thomas muses to Music Times. "Prior to COVID, I felt like my career track was quite solid and moving in exactly the right direction, so turning 40 two years after COVID felt gross. I felt like I'd missed out on so many opportunities. I felt Fun City [which came out in September 2020] had stalled and didn't have the lifespan it should've had, because I didn't get to do any shows for it. I really did feel depression related to age on my 40th birthday — but I actually felt a lot better on my 41st."
Now a rejuvenated, 41-year-old Thomas is releasing his collaboration-packed and very fun fifth album, Enjoy Youth, which has helped him get his groove back after "a really s--- time" when he'd "stopped being in love with life, which is really not my personality type at all and not my disposition. Enjoy Youth was a way to remember to cultivate and perpetuate moments of joy." Among the banger- and bop-filled album's special guests are '90s electronic music icons Ultra Naté and Berri, Canadian songstress Beth Hirsch (best known for her vocal work on Air's landmark debut Moon Safari), Scissor Sisters' Babydaddy, legendary mashup maestro Richard X, and buzzy R&B/Broadway star Mykal Kilgore.
"It was really nice to feel the actual purpose of music, which is connection with other people, and to have that really become 3D again. The coolest thing about making the album for me was feeling like it was a real thing, not just something on a laptop," says Thomas. "What I love most about music is the community around it, the people dancing and the fun it creates. I'd been a touring artist since I was 17, so to suddenly have no connection with people in a real space [during the pandemic] was very alarming. I didn't realize how dependent I was on the ability to do that, to feel those endorphins and feel like my music had a connection outside of the bedroom. I don't think I realized how much of my self-worth and self-identity I got from connecting with people.
"The thing that I'm really proud of with this album is that with every single collaborator, I have a very, very strong personal connection," Thomas continues, beaming. "There is not a single person on the record that I don't text with regularly, or email, or see if we're in the same place. And there are very few artists that have that sort of relationship with the collaborators on their records. It makes me feel like I chose the right people, that I curated it really well, because they all care and are having so much fun with it and are really excited for the album to come out. And that feels amazing."
Wanting Enjoy Youth to be "a nod-with-a-wink to the stuff that really made me happy" growing up in the "not gay-friendly" small Welsh town of Neath ("Actually, it wasn't a 'small town' — it was the middle of nowhere, not even a village," he clarifies drily), Thomas enlisted various heroes-turned-pals. For instance, producer Richard X, who Thomas first met in 2010 through Enjoy Youth co-producer Ian Masterson at their jointly held "pop-producer Christmas meetups, where we would hang out and have these pop-geek meetings," was "the first person that taught me about mashups. I have him to thank for that part of my brain."
Ultra Naté, who guests on the effervescent, swooning bop "Every Emotion" (and was supposed to perform with Thomas at New York Pride 2020 before the world shut down), is someone Thomas has adored since childhood. "God, I spent so much money on her CD singles when I was a teenager in Woolworth's in Neath. I love her catalog, I love her legacy, and I love that she's still making amazing records and still DJing all the time. She's a superstar. I cannot say enough good things about her," he gushes.
But it was the Hirsch collab, on the album's dreamy coda and title track, that's the most personal. The song is a direct love letter to Thomas's best friend, Janice — "truly the most inspiring person I've ever met in my life; I would not be where I am without her" — who he first met in an AOL chatroom when they were both 15. Thomas visited Janice regularly when she was working as an au pair in Paris, and they "used to listen to Air's Moon Safari all the time. So, Beth's voice is very synonymous with me to my friend and Paris and that period of my youth. Beth was Janice's favorite singer, so I got to send Janice this track about our friendship with her favorite singer on it, and it was just like... you know, it's not often in life that you realize you've f---ing nailed a brief. But I really thought I'd done something great with that one. It's one of the proudest things I've ever done in my whole life. Janice loved it, and I just felt like that is maybe my crowning-glory moment."
The title "Enjoy Youth" was inspired by Thomas and Janice's Parisian adventures, when the two clubbing, globe-trotting friends got some advice that hits different now that Thomas is in his forties and making up for lost time post-pandemic. "Janice was working for this family and she had a room on the sixth floor," Thomas recalls. "We would go down the back stairs to leave, and we were going out one night and the family's grandmother opened the door and was like, 'Hey, where are you going?' And we were desperately underage and we said, 'Oh, we're going to a club.' And she looked at us and just went: 'Enjoy youth!' And we thought it was so fabulous because the glow on her face, it was really a lust for life. She was probably only in her mid-sixties at that point, maybe 70, but she was so young-at-heart and so happy for us to be having this crazy night out. That phrase kind of stuck with me, and during these hours and weeks and months of COVID, that phrase kept coming back to me."
Thomas says he's "having more fun making pop music than I did in my twenties" and doesn't have any "huge hang-ups about age," even though he chucklingly recalls a publicist once advising him to "shave a few years off my age" when he was starting out at 25 and apparently "already considered too old to be a man making pop music." So, he doesn't consider Enjoy Youth be an exercise in nostalgia. "I don't think I've replicated the past here. I haven't sampled any '80s or '90s tracks or tried to reproduce any '90s sounds. It's like, these [guest] singers are still alive and still sound great and are still creative and fabulous, so why don't I just ask them to be on the record? If I'd wanted it to be nostalgic, I would've sampled them. But I wanted it to feel fresh and modern, so I invited them to collaborate," he points out.
But Thomas says it's "really painful to acknowledge" that there's one childhood hero that he'll never get the chance to collaborate with: George Michael, whose "I Want Your Sex" inspired the title of "You Want My...," Enjoy Youth's sexy lead single.
"Anyone who knows my Wikipedia page will notice that I've collaborated with almost all of my heroes," says Thomas, who was championed early on in his career by tourmate and duet partner Elton John. "But George is one that will never be a collaborator or a friend. I find it really hard to recognize the fact that he is actually dead. I get really emotional every time I think about him no longer being with us. He was such an inspiration. The Older album is absolutely the perfect album for me, and when he exploded with that record with 'Jesus to a Child,' 'Fastlove,' and 'Spinning the Wheel,' those three songs sent me out of my skull as a child. And he was younger than I was making Older than I was making Enjoy Youth! To think, he was 33 when making that album. That's crazy."
While Thomas never got to befriend Michael, he looks back on his discography and long list of collaborators/friends and realizes, despite how bleak life can sometimes seem, that he's very lucky, and he can't wait to actually tour this new record.
"I didn't think this was possible. I didn't think that someone like me could ever do these things. I didn't even think that these were things that people could do," he admits. "When I was growing up in a very isolated place as an only child, it was culturally lonely for me. I didn't see anything around me that looked or felt like me, and the radio was a way to hear about these lives and these worlds and these situations, which I hoped maybe one day I'd get to be part of. And I did. I met the people that sing these songs. I met people like them. I met the people that they were singing about. And so, for me the power of music is showing that there's a possibility of a different plane of existence, of a different outcome, of a different set of realities. It is really important that we remember that yes, this is where we are now, but this is not the only thing that life can be.'
"Music taught me that I was not alone, and that I was not the only gay person where I'm from, and that I was not the only person feeling heartbreak or ambition or fear or confusion. So, Enjoy Youth is really just me reminding myself that life is actually wonderful and the world is an amazing place — despite some people trying to tell you that it's really not and that you don't deserve the good things in the world. Maybe Enjoy Youth is a utopic vision of what would happen if we [LGBTQ+ people] were actually allowed to have all those things. So, I hope that some of these songs give people inspiration and hope."
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