Toronto band Valley visited The Current studio to play stripped-down versions of songs from their new album, Water The Flowers, Pray For A Garden, released August 30. Afterwards, band members Alex Dimauro, Karah James and Rob Sowinski stuck around for a conversation about the album with host Bill DeVille.

Watch the performances above, and watch the interview below. Just below that, you can find a transcript of the interview.

Interview Transcript

Bill DeVille: Hey, I'm Bill DeVille, and I'm here with the band Valley. They have a brand new album that is on the way. It drops on the 30th of August. It's called Water The Flowers, Pray For A Garden. Go ahead and introduce yourselves.

Alex Dimauro: I'm Alex from Valley.

Karah James: I'm Karah from Valley. 

Rob Sowinski: Hi. I'm Rob from what they say...

Alex Dimauro: "...from Valley"?

Bill DeVille: Well, it's nice to see you all. The first thing I noticed about you: It's hard to Google your name! Was that by design?

Alex Dimauro: We actually, we did design it that way. We didn't want to be found.

Rob Sowinski: Yeah, we wanted to be mysterious. I think it's changing slowly. I feel like you have to type in "Valley band", I guess.

Alex Dimauro: If you look up "Valley band, you'll find us.

Rob Sowinski: Yeah.

Alex Dimauro: If you just type "Valley," they'll be like, "What Valley?"

Rob Sowinski: Yeah, I feel like it's like that until it's not. I feel like we have a few friends that have pretty funny band names where it's like, yeah, you have to really give context to Google. I feel like for the first few years when Coldplay was around, when you typed in "Coldplay," Google was like, "What the hell does that mean? What is it?"

Bill DeVille: So when I Googled you, I found, like, this music paper from middle New York, the valley there, the Hudson Valley.

Rob Sowinski: Oh, yeah.

Bill DeVille: Anyway, so let's talk about the brand new album. How is this one different than your previous work?

Rob Sowinski: Ooh, different ...

Alex Dimauro: I think it's, it's a, in a way, a return with

Rob Sowinski: It's our “Saturn return” album.

Alex Dimauro: It's our Saturn return album, but with a maturity to it that I think we've been been doing this for a long time, and we've finally kind of come back around to what we love taste-wise, and I guess maybe what we love writing about.

Rob Sowinski: Yeah, yeah. I think we just started taking making music seriously again. Because I think for like, three years up to our last record, like, we basically had a weird kind of period where we put out two EPs during the pandemic, and then, like, an album. And I've been reflecting on a lot, and I realized I just didn't think we created ... We didn't take it seriously enough in a sense; we did take it very seriously — the songs still are great, and we put a lot of heart into them — but I think we just forgot that, like making songs and making art and whatever we do is like, so, so important. And I think we forgot a little bit about that, because we got sucked into the vortex that you do once you have some success, you get sucked into this vortex of like, "Well, now your job is to make songs," and it's like, yes, but it's so much more than that, because it's like, our life. It's a lifestyle that we live, and it's so important to express ourselves and do this thing. And I don't know, I think we left it by the side a little bit. So this is a very much like Alex said, a return to like, the seriousness of how we take what we get to do, because it's such a privilege, but it's also such a service, I think, to ourselves, to be able to take this seriously and make songs that we really believe in and express ourselves and put our entire life story in the thing. And yeah, this album just feels like a very return to like how we started the band, because the first three years of starting the band felt like what the band feels like now. So, yeah, it's just a full circle.

Bill DeVille: You're 10 years in now.

Rob Sowinski: Yeah.

Bill DeVille: Did you think it would last? I mean, when you formed back in, was it 2014?

Alex Dimauro: I didn't see myself doing anything else. I saw ... it's weird, because, like, I feel like when you're a kid, you see this, like, bright future and all these possibilities. Not to say we don't have that, but I think when we started the band, at least for myself, I didn't look forward and see anything aside from the band.

Bill DeVille: Did you all have that kind of lightbulb moment and it's like, "This is what I want to do. I want to be in a band"? 

Rob Sowinski: You kind of have to, though.

Bill DeVille: Yeah.

Rob Sowinski: Like, you kind of have to be a little insane. Because, like, when you look at it on paper when you're like, 15 years old, and you put your hands in and you're like, "We're gonna start a band, and we're gonna make this our life, and we're gonna tour the world, and we're gonna do all these things," you have to be a little crazy to think that, you know, believe and follow your dreams. But I feel like anyone that really goes for it has to have just that right amount of, like, insanity to think that it's actually possible.

Karah James: The thing is, there, there's actually no thought put into it. And I think that...

Bill DeVille: It just happened, huh?

Rob Sowinski: Just happened.

Karah James: Yeah, like, you can't ... Like, the best things in life are the things that you are sort of just doing and taking action on. And like, I think when you start thinking about the act of following a dream, you're not actually doing it. Like, nobody is ... You can't preach, like, nobody preaches something that they just know is in existence. Like, nobody goes around town being like, "The sun is gonna rise tomorrow, everybody! The sun's gonna rise! Like, I'm telling you!" Everyone's like, "We know." But like, you don't go around being like, "I'm gonna be a musician when I grow up!" Like, "I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it, I'm going to do it." Like we all had a moment before we even met, like we knew what we were going to do. We knew it. It was the way of our life. And I feel like that's just, like, you don't think about that when you're nine years old or however old we were when we decided we wanted to do it our whole life. And then we met each other and we were like, "Oh yeah, this makes sense."

Bill DeVille: How did you meet? Speaking of which.

Rob Sowinski: A similar room to this that we're in right now, which is funny. Yeah, our friend — my sister in high school had this friend that was, like, a recording engineer, and he, like, worked at a studio. A big deal at the time, because when you're young, you're like, "Studio? Whoa! Like the movies?" And then so we literally went in — me and Alex were in a separate band, and then Karah and Mickey [former Valley bandmate Mike "Mickey" Brandolino] were in a separate kind of project — and we, me and Alex, just booked some time at this, you know, at my sister's friend's studio.

Alex Dimauro: To mess around.

Rob Sowinski: To mess around.

Alex Dimauro: Nothing serious. That was the funny thing; like, it wasn't like, we didn't go in being like, "Let's record this song!"

Rob Sowinski: No.

Alex Dimauro: We just went in doing nothing.

Rob Sowinski: It was similar to this. I remember me and Alex were in the live room where we are right now, just tweaking some amps. And then through the studio window, Karah and Mickey were like, working on a mix of a song at the console, literally with Steve his name was.

Alex Dimauro: And they hid behind...

Rob Sowinski: And then they hid behind us. And then we realized we got double booked. So we just, like, kind of went to our friend Steve. We're like, "Dude, we're supposed to be in the control room now, but they're in there," and it turned into this whole kind of serendipitous thing, and then, like you said, 10 years later, the band just kind of like snowballed from that night. We just kind of got together, kept working on songs. We went — Karah and Mickey were playing, like, an open mic night; we like, went and saw that, and then we were like, "We have to start a band." And then we kind of just started the band. It was very like, I don't know, just it kind of was kind of like a movie. It just kind of happened.

Bill DeVille: So you guys are from Toronto. Toronto has kind of a rich history of music. I wrote down a few names: The Beaches, they were just here in our studio, and they're friends of yours, right?

Rob Sowinski: Good friends. Karah wrote a few songs on their last record.

Bill DeVille: That's really cool! And there's Broken Social Scene, of course, with Feist. And Cowboy Junkies who recorded their Trinity Session album at a church in Toronto. You probably even know the church, the Trinity Church. And probably most famously, Rush.

Alex Dimauro: Yes, yeah. 

Rob Sowinski: We were just talking about Neil Peart the other day, yeah.

Alex Dimauro: Well, somebody was like, well, I think they looked at Karah and they were like, "So?"

Karah James: It was Joe Cool.

Alex Dimauro: Joe Cool! He was like, "So, what do you think? Neil Peart." And you were like, "Yeah, I love Neil Peart."

Rob Sowinski: I guess a lot of, I find when we're in America, a lot of people, when we talk about drummers, they automatically go to Neil Peart they know from Canada, which I think is awesome, because, yeah, I would say he's one of the best.

Karah James: Canada has a very good, like, output of music.

Rob Sowinski: Historically, yeah.

Karah James: Yeah, there's so many.

Bill DeVille: It seems like there's more musicians per capita there than there is in the States.

Alex Dimauro: I didn't want to say it, but I agree with you.

Karah James: We have a really good funding system, like, similar to Australia, they want, the government really wants, like, an export to be art, which is great. And, like, I think Sweden is the same with their ... like, you get paid to go to school, to go to production school in Sweden. Like, it's crazy. That's not quite the level that we're at in Canada, but there's, like, millions of dollars that they output for grants.

Rob Sowinski: Yeah, a lot of opportunities. I mean, we took advantage of it, not "took advantage," we literally, like, couldn't have started the band without the funding in Canada. I'm sure a lot of artists you mentioned, same thing. Start out with those government grants and stuff.

Alex Dimauro: Half of our first record was paid for by grants.

Karah James: It has to be, like, made in Canada, or like, parts of it, but like, there's ways.

Rob Sowinski: There's ways.

Karah James: You know!

Bill DeVille: So Toronto is basically a good place to be for a musician.

Karah James: It's great! If you're a Canadian citizen, it's great, because you can't get the funding unless you're Canadian citizen. But yeah,

Bill DeVille: So you had a song called "Like 1999," it kind of blew up during the the COVID 19 pandemic. Why don't you tell us about that experience and that song? 

Alex Dimauro: Well, it all happened very quickly. The intention was not for a song to blow up at any time during that — I mean, like, it's obviously a blessing, you know, in disguise when that does happen — but I don't think we were looking for that to happen at that time. We had gone away for a writing trip to finish up a bunch of music that we were working on for our second EP. And it was like at the very beginning of this trip, too, and just kind of, we put a TikTok up — Tiktok was also very new at the time, anybody could go viral — and we were anybody, and one of our songs went viral, and it was that song. And the label and everybody was kind of like, "Jump on it, do it in like three days." And so we finished it. I think it was like three, maybe four days from like the song, the inception of the song being written with our really good friend Charlie Adams and Johnny from Nightly. And, yeah, we just had to rush it out, basically. And it was a great experience.

Rob Sowinski: Yeah, it's funny. An analogy I've been using for it a lot is like, if ... I want to nail this right. If songs are kind of like tattoos, you know what I mean?

Bill DeVille: They're forever?

Rob Sowinski: They're forever, yeah, but, you know, as you grow and change, sometimes, you know, sometimes you cover one up, or sometimes you're a little shy about one that you got earlier on. I feel like the go-to answer for this, truthfully, would be like, "Oh, we're so embarrassed of that song."

Alex Dimauro: Like the ex-girlfriend.

Rob Sowinski: "That song does not define where we are," and "That song does not define where we're going and who we are now." But I've learned to live with the idea that I'm really thankful for that song. That song took us around the world. It took us to Asia, it took us to Australia. It changed our whole life, and that's where we give it a lot of grace. Is it like the most like important, like, identification of his band anymore? No. Are we still gonna play it sometimes? Yes. And like, we're really thankful for that song, but I've learned to just treat it kind of like an old tattoo, where it's like, "Yeah, it was a moment. Maybe I got it when I was drunk, but it's still OK. It's OK. I'm gonna keep it on me."

Alex Dimauro: Yeah.

Rob Sowinski: And that's kind of that song. But we love it.

Bill DeVille: Let's talk about the song "When You Know Someone." What was the inspiration behind that? By the way, it's big and epic, and it just sounds wonderful on the radio. Congratulations on the song, it's killer.

Rob Sowinski: Thank you so much. That's kind of a song that we've been trying to write forever. And like, we've tried, like, there's like remnants of our first record, where we've tried to tap into that song, where we never could crack it. But that song, yeah, it's special. It started with, like, a four-bar loop that I made at home. I was listening to a lot of Bruce Springsteen at the time, which probably comes through a little bit. I was listening to a lot of like Nebraska, but Nebraska is very, like, tight and insular and very, like, quiet record for Bruce. But I feel like I tried to create the Nebraska feeling, but expand it into like a Born in the U.S.A. kind of feeling. So we ended up going the studio with with Chase [Lawrence, producer] and Trent [Dabbs, songwriter] and us, and, yeah, I just played the four-bar loop, and we started writing. And again, the best songs just kind of happen. You can't really control how it happens. It just like someone just started going, "But you know someone...," and then, you know, the song's born.

But in terms of the topic, I mean, that day was hard because we were still processing Mickey obviously leaving the band, and it was a very low point of making the album. The whole making of the album was pretty grief heavy and a lot of processing, a lot of crying, but that day in particular, we didn't know how to say what we wanted to say. And I remember Chase and Trent just like, really holding our hand, being like, "We'll help you. Don't worry. Just like, just like, if you want to chime in, chime in, but we're going to help you really, like, figure out what you want to say." And I remember Chase talking to Trent, just kind of giving him context. Like, "This is kind of where they're at right now."  They had, like a — Because we looked so deflated. We were like, "This ...!" We're just like, we were little fragments of a band at that point. But yeah, that song's kind of about abandonment, a little bit.

Karah James: Yeah, they had like, a text chat going the night before, because it was the first day, I think, or the second day or something. Yeah, it was second day we were working with Trent and, like, he showed me his like, conversation with Chase, and it was like, "Yeah, the kids are really going through it right now." And he was like, "They're really down." Like, he was like, so, like, sad. But it was also like, really nice, because they were talking about us as if we were, like, these people that they literally just want to, like, have this, like, therapeutic session the next day with, because the first day we worked with this kind of, like, more of a fun song and, like, that's cool, but, yeah, it's like, it's, there's, it's really, it was really special to have collaborators like just Chase and Trent on this album, because they're not people that are, like, looking for a hit or, like, looking to get something out of these days in the studio. Like, Trent was kind of just like, "When you know someone, you think you know someone," and like, it was in that moment, it all just clicked with us. And we were like, "Yeah, like, that's the feeling like, and we need help. We need help to, like, get this out into the world." Because, like, I don't know it's, it's you just kind of, we blocked out and then the song was written. But we were, it was, it was still such a great experience. Because, like, it was, yeah, like Rob said, so therapeutic, the whole beginning-to-end process. And that was one of the harder songs definitely to write.

Bill DeVille: It sure was nice to hear you play. You talked about Nebraska, and the version you just did here was more of an acoustic version. 

Rob Sowinski: Yeah, almost. Yeah. The second, kind of... Yeah, we like to switch it up. I mean, with these kind of settings, it's nice to kind of present it in a more campfire, arguably, way.

Alex Dimauro: Yeah, these songs translate well that way.

Rob Sowinski: They do.

Alex Dimauro: And I think it's fun for us to do versions like this on this record. And I feel like the trend won't stop, like we're probably going to continue to do versions of our songs like this. I feel like.

Rob Sowinski: Yeah, these songs feel good in the lap, you know?

Alex Dimauro: Yeah.

Rob Sowinski: Much more.

Bill DeVille: That's like, what, you know, MTV Unplugged was when it first started, when bands would tell you about the songs.

Rob Sowinski: I was just watching a bunch of those, MTV Unplugged. I sometimes, when I'm just laying in bed at the hotel, like, going, like, MTV Unplugged playlists on YouTube, because they're so old now, but like, there's some crazy ones. I just watched the "Friday I'm in Love" one, like The Cure one.

Bill DeVille: I saw that one, that was great.

Alex Dimauro: Yeah.

Rob Sowinski: Just such an incredible time.

Bill DeVille: I saw that you guys hit one billion streams.

Rob Sowinski: Yeah.

Bill DeVille: What does that feel like? A billion? That's a lot. It's a big number.

Rob Sowinski: A lot of numbers.

Alex Dimauro: That's pretty crazy. Yeah. I don't know if it's something that we ever thought about. I think initially, when I remember the first day, one of our songs started getting a serious amount of traction, like, more than just, like family and friends listening.

Bill DeVille: Yeah.

Alex Dimauro: And I think it was tossed into, like a Spotify algorithm. And I think, I remember being in Mike's basement, looking at the computer running upstairs, being like, "Oh my God!" Like, I think it was "Swim." I was like, "'Swim' is taking off!" And it had, like, I think it was either three or 30,000 streams in a day. And I was like, This is insane. This is the first time this has ever happened to us. And like, when things like that happen, and there's like, really initial, big moments that are very exciting, like that, that's really cool, you know, because you're like, "Oh, like, people are actually listening."

Bill DeVille: Right.

Alex Dimauro: And I think we don't pay attention to the numbers as much. I mean, if anybody does in this band, it's probably me, but...

Karah James: We need, like, 10 bucks. OK? It was sick. It was sick!

Rob Sowinski: We got croissants. 

Karah James: We got free Starbucks.

Alex Dimauro: I think it's, I think it's validating to know that people are listening.

Rob Sowinski: Yeah.

Alex Dimauro: And it's not necessarily about the number, it's about the fact that—

Rob Sowinski: It's the people behind the number.

Alex Dimauro: People still care, and they're still gonna go and toss on, you know, their favorite song of ours, or record or whatever.

Bill DeVille: You know, one thing that I think is kind of cool is you played Seventh Street Entry here in the Twin Cities, in Minneapolis a couple years ago, back in 2022. Now, when you come back in October, you're playing the Mainroom at First Avenue. You know, Purple Rain!

Karah James: Yeah. We really love that venue. We're all so excited though. We've played it a couple times with like, other bands and like, it's good, it's a good spot.

Rob Sowinski: It's a legendary room. I'm excited. I'm telling our front of house guy to play, to sound check with "I Wanna Be Your Lover" by Prince.

Alex Dimauro: Oh, nice. That's a good idea.

Bill DeVille: Covers always go over well.

Alex Dimauro: Oh yeah. Hey, we could, we could throw something crazy in the set. One day maybe.

Rob Sowinski: Oh yeah.

Bill DeVille: Well, it's nice chatting. It's the band Valley from Toronto, Canada. The new album is called Water The Flowers, Pray For A Garden, and that'll drop on August 30. Congratulations on the new work, and it's nice chatting with you, and you sounded awesome.

Alex Dimauro: Thank you so much.

Valley in studio

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Songs Performed

00:00:00 Water The Flowers, Pray For A Garden
00:03:33 Bass Player’s Brother
00:06:27 When You Know Someone
All songs from Valley’s 2024 album, Water The Flowers, Pray For A Garden, available on Universal Music Canada.

Musicians

Robert Sowinski – guitar, lead vocals
Karah James – drums, harmonica, backing vocals
Alex Dimauro – guitar, backing vocals
Ian Moore – guitar, keys

Credits

Guests – Valley
Host – Bill DeVille
Producer – Derrick Stevens
Audio – Evan Clark
Video – Alex Simpson, Eric Xu Romani
Graphics – Natalia Toledo
Digital Producer – Luke Taylor

External Link

Valley – official site