Musicians Featured: Valley
February 2nd, 2022
Juno-nominated Band Valley on Their Album Last Birthday
Last month, I caught up with Karah James, Alex Dimauro, and Rob Laska from the JUNO-award nominated band Valley. Valley is a Toronto-based quartet who you might recognize from their existential, entertaining, and nostalgia-inducing songs like SOCIETY and Like 1999.
Read on to take a deep-dive into their lyrics, learn about how they started got started as musicians, and to see if you caught the reference to The Cure on their album Last Birthday.
Emily Weatherhead, Founder
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EW: So first of all, let’s talk about your journey into music. As a band, you have this serendipitous story of getting double-booked in a studio, and that’s how Valley was formed. I want to take it a bit earlier than that – how did each of you individually get started with music?
RL: My story is kind of similar to most people that fall into this career. My parents are immigrants from Europe. They immigrated here in the early 90s, and they were working pretty blue-collar jobs - my dad was delivering pizza and my mom was cleaning houses. I found that music was very much an escape for them.
I grew up in a church, and I’m not really a part of it anymore, but it was a great opportunity for me to sing in front of people. I started doing Christmas concerts and stuff when I was really little, and that led to high school music lessons, and realizing that music was something I really wanted to do.
I realized pretty quickly how much of a privilege that is as well – that my parents had enough intuition in them to be like “We don’t have a lot, but let’s put him in lessons. Let’s put him in the community center. Let’s put him in church. Anywhere where he can perform or sing. Let’s do it.” So that was my story of getting started.
“We made this shoebox-drum-kit thing, and had pie plates hanging from the ceiling as cymbals. And I picked up the drumsticks that my uncle had given me, and I just played that thing until it was absolutely disintegrated.”
KJ: I started playing drums when I was ten years old. My uncle plays drums, so I would just always see drumsticks lying around the house - he would be like, “Do you want these?” And I didn’t play drums, so I was like, “Sure, I guess.”
One day, I had a friend over and I was like, “We should make a drum kit from scratch.” So we made this shoebox-drum-kit thing, and had pie plates hanging from the ceiling as cymbals. And I picked up the drumsticks that my uncle had given me, and I just played that thing until it was absolutely disintegrated. I took drum lessons pretty much from then on, and then I went to post-secondary for drums.
I only really started singing when Valley started, because we were always looking for a higher octave above Rob’s voice so that it could fill in. They were like, “Karah, you should try singing,” so I just started singing that way, just purely for sonic preference. And then, it just kind of became a brand. That’s my story.
AD: My story is a little more basic – I grew up with a bunch of friends who played music. I had this one family friend, and he had this sh**ty little old Epiphone SG guitar that I was obsessed with. I was like, “Oh my God, I want to buy this off you, and teach myself how to play.” He actually just let me have it for a while, and so I ended up just kind of messing around with that.
My parents ended up putting me in guitar lessons. I wasn’t good at doing my theory work or anything like that, but I ended up teaching myself a lot of stuff and developing my ear over time, just teaching myself how to play different songs.
That turned into me messing around on the piano, and then messing around on the bass, and that’s where I landed now with the band. I ended up playing that in jazz band and concert band in high school, so I developed a little bit more there. And that takes us to now.
“We try to write for every moment, and I feel like there’s probably some moments that we don’t have captured just yet. Maybe it’s a good thing, though.”
EW: What moments in life is your music made for?
KJ: Driving, and break-ups.
AD: I feel like we try to write for every moment, and I feel like there’s probably some moments that we don’t have captured just yet. Maybe it’s a good thing, though.
RL: We write in a lot of different formats, too. We’ll write from a personal perspective, from a friend’s perspective, from a character’s perspective. I think that gives us an advantage, because we can tap into things that we’ve maybe not felt, but someone around us has felt. Our first record talked a lot about growing up, and death. I know that’s dark, but we kind of explore the whole spectrum of the universe of feelings. I’d say driving, break-ups, and late-night winding down music are our top three.
“Sometimes we’ll write stuff and not really know exactly what we’re trying to say in the moment, and then someone will come up to us and say ‘Hey, this song means this to me, and here’s why.’ And that is really incredible.”
EW: How do you think that music can help to build a sense of community and connect us?
KJ: A lot of our fans and a lot of people that we talk to, their entire community is going to shows and supporting musicians. I think that can be a really safe place for people. I know for Rob and Alex, that was very much their sort of lifeline – going to shows and listening to music, and trying to connect with the people that they admired onstage. And now I think they’re those people for some 16 year-old kids. Which is a really beautiful thing.
EW: Yeah – I think it’s really cool that it creates all these full circle moments, and you get to be a part of them. So switching gears a little bit – something that I really enjoy about your lyrics is that they’re super specific but really relatable at the same time. When you’re sharing things that are so personal, how does it feel to have people say that they really relate to your music?
RL: It’s pretty awesome. It’s just a very grateful, thankful feeling, and it is very full circle. It is very interesting too, because I find that a lot of people understand our songs, and lyrics, and meanings in a different way. Sometimes we’ll write stuff and not really know exactly what we’re trying to say in the moment, and then someone will come up to us and say “Hey, this song means this to me, and here’s why.” And that is really incredible. It’s hard to quantify even the feeling – it feels really good that people connect to it.
“I don’t think that we’re meant to be happy all the time and I don’t think that we’re meant to be sad, but without either night or day, you can’t know what one of them feels like.”
EW: Yeah. In All The Animals I Drew As A Kid you have the line “In the case of a tragedy, I still wouldn’t press rewind.” So I know what that means to me, but what does that mean to you?
KJ: I mean there’s definitely a couple things there. The kind of main thing is that bad things happen to the people that maybe don’t deserve them – I don’t think that anyone deserves a bad thing to happen. But when something happens in life that is challenging, I don’t think it’s productive to wish it away and [say] there was no purpose to that.
I think everything or everybody in life is like a teacher, either teaching you something positive that you can hone within yourself, or teaching you something that you don’t want to be. It’s just about creating a silver lining and using that adversity as part of your story.
I don’t think that we’re meant to be happy all the time and I don’t think that we’re meant to be sad, but without either night or day, you can’t know what one of them feels like. Bad stuff happens, and you just have to take it as it comes.
“We’re always pushing our lyrical vocabulary, and how you can convey lyrics and messages. We always like double meanings, that’s something we do a lot.”
EW: In your songs, you sing a lot about the difficult sides of relationships and mental health. You have this line in your song Cure, “Boys don’t cry, but that’s a lie.” Do you feel like there’s something about music that gives you permission to express yourself in a way that you couldn’t somewhere else?
RL: Definitely. I think that writing songs is like an emotional hall pass. It’s an opportunity for you to, like you just said, word things or express things in a manner that you wouldn’t in a conversation. Usually that’s being more brutally honest or more direct, because you know you have melody and you have production and you have all these things to compliment your idea or your thought – whether it’s a good thought, or a bad thought, or a jealous thought, or an angry thought.
We’re always pushing our lyrical vocabulary, and how you can convey lyrics and messages. You just mentioned “Boys don’t cry, but that’s a lie” – that’s a reference to The Cure. We always like double meanings, that’s something we do a lot. That line means one thing on paper, but also in the studio we’re like, “The Cure is one of our favourite bands, let’s find a way to reference them.” It’s super important to us.
“I feel like there is kind of an itch that you need to scratch when it comes to music and we definitely find ways to get that. Playing live is definitely one of my favourite things to do. That’s my itch that I scratch.”
EW: You also sing about society, and the music industry, and how there can be a lot of pressure to sell yourself as an artist outside of just sharing music. How do you stay connected to making music just for the sake of making music?
AD: I feel like there is kind of an itch that you need to scratch when it comes to music and we definitely find ways to get that. We all have different cravings when it comes to music, whether that’s writing, or performing, or every other little thing that goes into releasing music. I think we all love the whole ride.
Playing live is definitely one of my favourite things to do. That’s my itch that I scratch. When we play songs that we have written live, and everyone’s taking those in, and we’ve brought a massive group of people together that are hopefully singing along, that’s a pretty cool experience.
EW: Do you have any final thoughts about why it’s important to make music accessible to people in our communities?
RL: It’s so important. I think that any kid, from grade school to high school, should have the opportunity to just pick it up or express an interest in it. Because music is such a “bringing together” thing. Music on its surface is very much about humans getting together, and that goes back centuries. I hope that down the line, there’s more and more opportunities for kids to pick up instruments and be exposed to music in a way that everyone can afford it, and anyone can have the opportunity.
EW: That’s awesome. Is there anything else you want to share with our audience?
RL: What do we have going on, guys? I mean so much - we have a music video dropping soon, we are going on our Headline North American Tour called the “I’ll be with you” tour which is already almost sold out. We have some other goodies dropping that we can’t talk about yet, and we’re recording a new song next week. So just look at our socials, and keep up with us, everything will be there!
