Lights and Her Devoted Congregation Fill Paradise Rock Club on Come Get Your Girl Tour
Tuesday nights don't typically belong to sold-out rock shows. Lights clearly didn't get that memo. Nearly two decades into her career, she packed Paradise Rock Club in Boston on March 10 with the kind of crowd that doesn't just show up out of curiosity or mid-week boredom. These were the faithful. Jerseys, shirts, hats, every lyric memorized. Walking into the room felt like stumbling into a communal church service, one where the congregation had been devotedly attending for years and wasn't planning on stopping anytime soon.
That kind of loyalty isn't easily earned. And Lights has earned it by being exactly who she is, both as an artist and as a person, show after show, album after album, for going on seventeen years. The Come Get Your Girl Tour, named after one of the standout tracks from her A6EXTENDED record (a deluxe expansion of A6) and opened with that very song. And the room was already fully locked in before the first chorus hit.
What followed played like a greatest hits run through one of the deeper catalogs in the genre, which is no small feat when you've been releasing music since 2008. “Running With the Boys", “River", “Alive Again", “Damage", a medley of “Timing Is Everything", “Flux and Flow" and “We Were Here" that hit like a truck of nostalgia for longtime fans. She even made room for a cover of Taking Back Sunday's “Cute Without the ‘E'", which landed exactly as well as you'd expect in Boston’s legendary Paradise Rock Club.
But the biggest reaction of the night was saved for the encore. “EDUCATION", the lead single off A6EXTENDED, closed the show and brought the room to its peak, the kind of finale that sends people out into the cold already looking forward to the next one.
Lights has always leaned into her nerdy side and the Come Get Your Girl Tour put that on full display. The tour poster arrived in full comic book style, and at one point during the set she performed from an illuminated A6 gaming chair, the kind of detail that makes her fans love her even more. It's not a gimmick. It's just who she is.
Opener Softcult warmed up the room with what they call “riotgaze," plowing through their set without pausing for introductions or pleasantries, letting the music do the talking entirely. It was refreshing in its own way. Even better was catching them in the audience during Lights' set, as enthusiastic as anyone else in the room, which is always a good sign.
Lights closed the night with a note that felt less like a stage sign-off and more like genuine life advice:
“I encourage you to take the side quests. The fun weird little things, the scary ones. When the quest givers are weird, and they're glitching out… those give the best swords, those give the best loot. Take the side quests. Enjoy life.”
On a Tuesday night in Boston, with a room full of people who have been following her for the better part of two decades, it landed exactly right.
