“You put a small light bulb in something made out of iron, it puts off a really cool shadow,” he says. “It makes a creative space a fun place to hang out.” Relying mainly on salvaged materials, some of them discovered in antique stores, he’s concocted more than 20 styles of light fixtures thus far. Jars, old stands, cast-iron string holders, door plates, and candelabras are among the unlikely items he’s re-purposed into light fixtures.
In addition to decking out his pad, Paslay has been giving the DIY lights away to fellow touring musicians as gifts. Sure, he could sell them at a friend’s store in Nashville, but he’s on the road so much that he doesn’t have the time to lug ’em all down there. “I have a bunch just sitting around, waiting for homes,” he laments.
One light fixture he’s yet to unload is a tractor wheel that he turned into a chandelier. “I have no place to hang it. It weighs, like, 75 pounds. If anyone hangs it up, they need to rebuild their whole house to hang that thing,” he says. “I’ve learned: Don’t buy the heavy stuff. Just don’t do that. I’ve got to find one of my really rich friends with giant beams in their houses.”
Paslay’s father was an electrician in the Navy and later worked for the telephone company for thirty years; he taught Paslay how to wire lights. “Make sure you’re safe and do it right and don’t leave any loose wires,” Paslay advises to fellow DIYers. “Put the black on black and the white on white.”
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“It’s a cool adventure,” he says of this hobby born out of necessity. “It’s a cool creative outlet for me. When you build a song, you can’t really hold it, but when you build a light, you can hold it and turn it on. It also can light up a room. I hope my music lights up a room in a good way, a positive way, all the time. It makes you feel something. Building gifts and building lights does that, too.”
But this light fixture fascination isn’t limited to Paslay’s home. He’s currently creating a flashing light sign for the merch table at his live shows and is planning to incorporate his homemade lights into the set design for a headlining tour this fall. “I don’t build all of them– because a lot of those lights are a lot smarter than me–but I’m still trying to add that vibe of real light bulbs,” he says.
Though the home where Paslay built his first light fixture is currently up for sale, he’s still attached to his creations. “The people love it, but it’s like, ‘If you really aren’t going to keep this light, I’ll take it with me.’ It fits the room right. I made it for that room. It seems fair,” he says.
On the horizon? Many more light fixtures. The home his wife of a year-and-a-half owns was just rebuilt and Paslay recently bought land north of Nashville. While there’s no homestead there to speak of yet, one thing’s for sure: he’s going to need a lot of lighting.
“Lighting is everything. It really is,” he says. “They don’t put a fluorescent light over the ‘Mona Lisa’ for a reason. You have to see everything in the right light.”
Light fixture photos provided by Eric Paslay.
