Lightning Bug (Photo by Ingmar Chen)
Lightning Bug’s upcoming album A Color of the Sky is an album of many firsts: the band’s first album with their new label home, Fat Possum, the band’s first time recording together as a live band.
Recently, Lightning Bug released “September Song, pt. ii,” the second single from the album.
Recorded in a rundown home-turned makeshift studio in the Catskills, A Color of the Sky finds Lightning Bug sounding more organic, dynamic and lush than ever, while also finding the band’s songwriter Audrey Kang sounding bolder than before.
Watch the official music video for “September Song, pt. ii” by Lightning Bug on YouTube:
In the third week of August 2019, along the windy coastline of southern Washington, Audrey arrived at a festival of kites. She made the stop during a trek across the Pacific Northwest, where she camped, hiked, surfed, and wandered alone in the area’s lush natural reserves. “I get a lot of inspiration from nature,” she said. “If I look at the sky and do a lot of nothing in nature alone — I don’t know. The songs just come.” The trip followed a series of endings in her life — work, love, relationships — that felt like an upheaval. Yet Audrey found peace and contentment there on the coast. “I really didn’t know what my life was going to look like,” she recalled. “But at the kite festival, I knew that each day I’d see a lot of beautiful kites, and each evening I’d watch the sunset and sleep on the beach. I felt like nothing could hurt me.”
What Audrey experienced during that trip, what she realized while watching the kites, would plant the seeds for A Color of the Sky, the third album by her band Lightning Bug. A record equally about quiet introspection and broad existential questions, A Color of the Sky reflects the journey of its songwriter emerging from intense self-doubt to find herself changed.
“I trusted no one, and was very unhappy with who I was,” Audrey said. “The key shift in my psyche was the realization that I was the sole person responsible for my life and happiness. That life holds no more and no less than the very purpose you give it yourself.”