Q&A: Ayleen Valentine Releases Delightfully Strange Singles 'anesthetized' & 'stars'
LIVING IS A SLOW BURN AT TIMES — and Ayleen Valentine makes music in that liminal space of confusion, chaos, and unexpected love. In her first A/B single package, a/b__1, she delves into rich sonic layers to build aural and emotional peaks wise beyond her years. Composed of haunting instrumentals and eccentric gritty synths, “anesthetized” and “stars'' are tracks that encapsulate the vulnerability and freedom in growing up.
Almost like a gut punch, “anesthetized” is an instrumentalist’s dream. With a transcendent melodic spin and delicate yet decisive lyricism, the release is an all-too-relatable love song for those worn out by the woes of love. Valentine wrote the track with the titular name in mind and built the production around her understanding of that deeply intimate and vulnerable feeling of living life in slow motion.
Following the spine-chilling song is the refreshingly eerie “stars” with its effervescent beats and nostalgic melody. The short but unforgettable hyper-pop tour de force shows off Valentine’s production chops and leaves listeners craving more, hungry to hit repeat. It comes across like a diary entry, as if she’s taking the words out of your own head as she sings them. “Why’d you make it hard / Why’d you break my heart” — one of those beautifully familiar inner dialogues that’s difficult to escape from.
The tracks are accompanied by complementary music videos edited by Valentine herself and directed by Genevieve Andrews, who is known for her work with Lizzo, Baby Tate, and Wallows. Going off the track’s feelings of insecurity, the “anesthetized” video is a fever dream of repressed emotions, in which Valentine gets lost in a liminal of her own making. As she searches for a way out, the song provides a cathartic release for those pent-up emotions.
The companion video for “stars” is a continuation of that catharsis toward freedom and inner power. It serves as a visual and sonic representation of Valentine’s emotional outpouring that fuels her artistry. The single package spans a range of emotions and offers a release even for those who didn’t know they needed one. It’s a truly heartbreaking exploration of polar opposites that coincide with the peculiarities of our strange world.
Stream a/b__1 wherever you get your music, and check out Valentine’s 2023 North American Tour supporting Riz La Vie with two headline shows in New York City and Boston. Read below to learn more about “anesthetized” and “stars,” how Valentine deals with anxiety, and more.
LUNA: First of all, thank you for being with us today! How did you come up with that amazing digital sound for “anesthetized”?
VALENTINE: I don't think I necessarily came up with that 100% (laughs). I think I just listened to a lot of digital electronic music. So that's just my taste and what I like. I just go based on sounds I like and think are cool and innovative, and that happens to be a lot of electronic and digital stuff. I love James Blake and I love a lot of the new things Thom Yorke is doing. And I’ve been super into digital sound recently, so I guess that's coming into my music as well!
LUNA: Those digital and electronic influences certainly come through. Is there a moment on “anesthetized” that stands out to you?
VALENTINE: Yes, of course. So the track started because I was meeting with my label for one of the first times and showing them music, and I was kind of in panic mode. I was like, “I need to show them something so cool and I need to make something that they're going to be impressed by,” so I came up with the idea for “anesthetized.” I didn't really think it was going to go anywhere but then I started mumbling and I said the word “anesthetize” and I was like, “Is that even a word? What did I just say? Like does this word even exist?” Then I looked it up and I was like, “Oh, it is a word. And this is the meaning and I like the meaning.” After that, I found a way to center the song around that and that whole state of being anesthetized by another person. You know, being so vulnerable under anesthesia around someone else — that type of thing. So yeah, I thought that word was really cool, and I wrote around it.
LUNA: That is a standout moment, and to have that word of all words be the thing that comes up is incredible. Somehow your brain said, “I know what you're going to do,” and manifested that for you. So, you're a singer and a producer — you do a little bit of it all — which is neat. When producing the single, what were some key elements, effects, or feelings that you wanted to come across?
VALENTINE: With the production, I wanted to have something like gated-sounding drums. I wanted drums that sounded live and natural and had a good groove to them. That’s what I was going for with my drums, and the melody too. If you listen to Imogen Heap after this, you're going to hear it. There are a lot of jumps in the melody, and my song was very much inspired by that era and sound. And also on the note of manipulating sounds and turning them electronic, there's a main synth line in the intro that started with just a plain synth and then I warped it completely. I liked the melody and I stretched it, cut it up again, and then bounced it — I just allowed myself to be weird. This was the first time I rapped in a song, too. It was new and really scary. I thought people might think it's cringe, but I was always told growing up that you have to do the things that scare you, so that was the goal with this single.
LUNA: Thank you for sharing all that. It’s great that you did something that scared you — that takes a lot of energy and effort. More on doing new things, where did the idea for the “anesthetized” music video come from, and what was the creative process behind that like?
VALENTINE: Basically, the label sent me a few directors, and out of all of them I really liked Genevieve Andrews the most. I thought she was really cool. Originally the video was supposed to be in a trailer and then outside at a campfire. I really liked the frozen people idea that was thrown out but wasn't really feeling the whole campfire thing so I was like, “What if we do it in a liminal space?” I've always wanted to do a video in a liminal space, and people have told me in the past that my music feels like a liminal space, which is funny. So I was like, “What if we do the whole frozen thing, but in a liminal space?” We found a really sick place in LA … it was a ’90s office, but eerie, and it felt like a back room. So yeah, that's how that happened.
LUNA: The liminal space feeling definitely comes across. It’s such a great visualization for listeners to hold onto with the track. Were there any inspirations that motivated you to go in that direction?
VALENTINE: Totally. I'm really inspired by Charlie Kaufman. He’s done things like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Those films are super abstract and weird, and I told Genevieve, “What if when I walk into the room there’s someone throwing up frozen vomit into a bucket, or someone drenched in water and smoking a cigarette, or someone blowing their hair and it's like they're frozen?” You know, just a bunch of little weird fever dream things.
LUNA: I had to do a double take when I saw the vomit in the trash can and the frozen people. I was like, “What’s going on? They're all doing something, but they're not moving.” It was a visual experience with these varied emotional undertones that I didn’t expect, and I loved it. How do you take care of yourself after having a heavy session? What’s your wind-down or self-soothing process like?
VALENTINE: I think after I do something wild with my music like that I feel really mentally happy. It’s like I’m on top of the world. I feel like I’m the best I’ve ever been. I'm like, “Oh, my God, this is so cool. I'm so happy.” But when it's not like that and when I don't have any good ideas that I'm proud of, I leave literally feeling like I failed everyone. It really gets to me, and I feel like a complete failure. So that's something I'm still learning to deal with and overcome. It's really hard. And yeah, I'm really anxious sometimes, so a lot of those thoughts really get to me.
LUNA: That makes sense — it sounds like it’s a lot of pressure to perform, and when you have difficulty I can see how that would be challenging. By the way, to be honest with you, I'm a little anxious right now. How do you deal with your anxiety?
VALENTINE: First of all, thank you, and me too girl, on the anxiety right now — me too. But yeah, after a session where I can't really come up with anything and I'm not happy with the way I sound, I curl up in a ball. I don't know, I sleep a lot, and it's not the best. I'm still learning to not take it so personally and feel like it's the end of the world. And this is going to sound stupid, but sometimes I like to play Fortnite.
LUNA: Okay, that's awesome! How do you pull yourself out when you get into a rut?
VALENTINE: I like to hang out with my friends sometimes. If I'm stuck I'll go back to the music I used to love, like Eminem and classic rock. I’ll listen to Aerosmith or Guns N’ Roses and remember why I love doing music. I watch live videos of Led Zeppelin or something along those lines and just try to get out of my head a little bit. Or I’ll find a new artist I like.
LUNA: Getting back to your passion and feeling connected is everything. Anxiety and heavy emotions are really difficult to deal with so the fact that you keep honing in on the fact that you're still learning is powerful. You have the awareness and ability to say, “It's difficult right now, and I'm still growing and taking care of myself.” What’s it like for you mental health–wise when you’re performing onstage?
VALENTINE: So rough. I literally played this show last night and I felt like an awful musician. I have so long to go with my stage presence and connecting with the crowd. It’s like with anything — it’s something that you learn and get comfortable with over time, but I just sometimes wish I wasn't so self-aware. I go into loops where I ask myself, “Why do I feel like this?” and “You shouldn't feel like that,” and then it's endless. It's hard because essentially this industry is monetizing emotions. Like, that's the job: for you to feel things all the time and write about them. But you don't always want to write about it. And then there's like the pressure of, like, “Oh, I'm feeling this way today. This is a good time to make a song” — that’s toxic.” Like, if you're feeling something, you don’t always have to write about it, you know?
LUNA: Exactly — just existing is enough, and that needs to be reinforced. Being alive is an art within itself when you really think about it. To pivot a little bit here, can you take us through how your haunting intro in “stars” was created?
VALENTINE: At that time, I had an awful sleep schedule and I was going to bed at like 8 or 9 a.m. every day and waking up at 6 p.m. in the evening. So one of those days I was in my apartment and the sun was coming up, so I went on my computer and just started something to see what would happen. I made a new session in Logic and it asked to name the track and I saw the sunrise coming up. I was like, “It has to be ‘sunrise beat.’” So that's where it started. Literally, the project file says “sunrise (aka I feel like death) beat.” I was really drowsy on my computer, with my eyes half-closed, and I just started playing the MIDI piano, and it sounded cool so I went along with it. And at the time, I was into hyperpop and wanted to make something in that vein, so I did the vocal chop thing. I think that was one of the first songs where I did vocal chops like that. So yeah, that's where it came from.
LUNA: What a fitting name for the single. I'm super glad you shared that. Now I’m going to see “stars” but with “sunrise (aka I feel like death) beat” in parentheses. Just an idea maybe for if you ever come out with a “stars” limited edition version. What drove you to produce “stars” in the way you did?
VALENTINE: I think a lot of my songs are shorter but that one is especially short. That was a song where I was just like, I'm not going to care about conventional ideals of what a song is or having a verse, chorus, verse, chorus. I'm literally just going to make the ugliest-sounding metallic drums that just hit you hard in your face and [use] vocal chops that are so loud and not think twice. Like, [I] just let out all my weird ideas and all my production quirks in a song. I just vomited out a bunch of ideas that I never thought could come out and be released, but then eventually I was like, “Why wouldn't I release this? I don't care that it's only a minute and a half. I don't care that people may say it's not a conventional song.” I liked it and I thought it was weird and cool, and I like songs that are weird and cool so I went with it.
LUNA: I’m so here for weird and cool. You have to do things that are unconventional to be a great artist and you’re doing that. Okay so I want to ask about your time as a student because I know that you left school to pursue music full-time. When did you know that you needed to drop out of the Berklee College of Music to pursue your career?
VALENTINE: I've always been a very intuitive person when it comes to life choices. And I do it with every aspect of my life. I don’t overthink things. But when it comes to life-changing decisions, I'm like, “Let’s do it.” Like, I'm just gonna move to LA or I'm gonna go to Berklee. I've always just done things on a whim. So with LA, I came out for like a few writing sessions and I loved the energy. In my gut, I was like, “You need to leave Berklee. You've always hated school. What are you doing there? It’s distracting you from actually being a musician.” From there I was like, “I'm buying a Spirit flight right now.” I packed all my stuff and within a few weeks I was in LA. And yeah, it was honestly not overthought too much. But I'm the first generation to go to college in my family so it was really hard to break it to my Mom, like, “Your dreams of me being a college graduate are over, I’m sorry.”
LUNA: But shoutout to that Spirit flight to let you get to LA that quick and act on that intuitive decision like that. You’ve talked about the people and genres that have inspired you — how would you say your background influences you when you write or produce songs?
VALENTINE: I just write about things that happen to me most of the time. Those are honestly the personal experiences that influence my music. One of my songs is about my relationship with my mother growing up and how she came from South America — she's from Peru. She was raised very differently than me and she tried her best, you know, but we didn't quite understand each other. So that influenced the way I connect with people now. And I’m a very anxiously attached person now. I'm not saying it's all because of her, but yeah, I think people are gonna abandon me all the time. Growing up with immigrant parents who didn't really understand mental health and talking about your feelings and how to deal with anxiety definitely put me in a shell. Then to have an outlet with music where I could get all those feelings out and feel safe was really helpful. Education-wise, I went to an art school, so that's where I learned a lot of the theory that goes into my production. And I get people who are like, “Where do you get your drum ideas from? They’re so weird-sounding.” And I'm like, “Jazz — it's all jazz.”
LUNA: I love jazz, and I would have never known that. That's an unexpected and really neat thing you have going for you. In what ways does jazz impact your music?
VALENTINE: Jazz musicians are one of my favorite kinds of musicians. They're just so creative and weird, and jazz drummers make these beats that are absolutely insane. I don't know how they do it, but I like to base a lot of my drum patterns off those jazz drums I heard growing up and in school. Those wild patterns that they would do get me every time.
LUNA: That's incredible; I’m going to listen to jazz a little differently now. And who knows, maybe become inspired and make some beats on my own one day. What are your favorite types of jazz beats?
VALENTINE: Awesome, and yeah, so much of the jazz I listen to has weird time signatures. A lot of my songs go into 7-8 or 5-4 time signatures. And so at first listen you wouldn't really hear it, but if you're a musician you would catch and be like, “Oh, look at that time signature change! That's cool.” And my specific songs with time signature changes are “i am a ghost,” which goes into 7-8, and “you're the one who's supposed to keep me safe,” which starts in 5-4.
LUNA: Now I'm definitely going to re-listen to them! We've been talking a lot about your artistry, the music you make, and we touched on your story. What are your favorite things about being an artist?
VALENTINE: My absolute favorite thing is seeing an idea come to fruition after starting in your head. You write it down and maybe you don't see it for a few months and leave it and put it away. And then one day you go back through your phone and then you start working on that idea. Then one day it's out on Spotify and you can physically listen to a culmination of ideas and the train of thought that happened that day. So yeah, I think that's really cool to have that tangible final product that you can watch or listen to. That has to be the most satisfying thing. There’s nothing like finishing a song or finishing a video and seeing all those ideas come together in a three-minute thing. Recently, I've been wanting to direct a short film or movie. I've been so inspired by movies, so that's an idea I want to go through with, but that's a whole different ballpark that I've never messed with.
LUNA: I can see that happening for you. What would your film be like? What do you imagine it being about?
VALENTINE: Wow, it would have to be something super abstract and have a kind of Everything Everywhere All At Once feeling. I'm super into physics and spiritual and philosophical movies. So something that, [that] just feels like, “What the heck is going on?” And maybe once I release all these singles, at the end of it I’ll release a little film with them as the soundtrack. Maybe not me acting in it, but yeah, directing something.
LUNA: Seeing the other side of things sounds satisfying too, especially since you’re into films. Here’s a fun question for you: If you could ask anyone, dead or alive, for their autograph, who would you choose?
VALENTINE: Oh, that's cool! It's funny, a lot of the people [who] I want an autograph from are dead, like Kurt Cobain. I was in my tour van after a show and I was like, “I can't believe Kurt Cobain is dead.” It just hit me when we were eating burritos. Everyone was like “What the heck? Why are you bringing this up? You’re really killing the family vibe right now.” Sometimes I'll just remember that these artists I love were real people. Their lives were not just some legend — like, no, Kurt actually was so depressed and so sad that he killed himself, and that was his life. And it just hit me while we were eating dinner. I was like, “Man, that really happens.” And it’s the same with Elliott Smith and a lot of artists that I love, like Amy Winehouse — a lot of them are dead. But I guess the one artist I love who's still alive is Thom Yorke from Radiohead. I've literally mentioned this so many times, that he's like my savior. I freaking love him so much. I think he's a genius.
LUNA: You’re talking about something so human there. It’s the fact that real people lived these difficult lives and we had no idea how hard it was for them in the industry. I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have been like for them. I wish someone was there to support them the way they needed before it was too late. And on the note of being there for others, are there any causes or organizations that you personally advocate for that you want to shoutout to readers?
VALENTINE: I love animals — I'm a huge animal person and I think they deserve love. You know, animals are conscious beings and they feel pain like you and I do. The fact that they’re literally murdered for no reason hurts me more than anything. We need to treat them like the amazing living, breathing conscious beings they are. It makes me sad to think about how much suffering they go through and not enough of us are stepping in to help them. So yeah, I’d definitely say PETA and all the animal rights organizations that stand up for them. Because they are creatures of this planet too who feel pain and sadness.
LUNA: Yeah, I feel you there. They’re just like us, and they need us to advocate for them. Thanks for shouting that out! To end off here, I’m curious: What type of questions do you wish more journalists asked you?
VALENTINE: Thanks for asking this. I wish more journalists asked me about philosophical ideas. Things like, “What do you think happens…” More of a conversation about life and not only my music. I feel like my music is influenced by a lot of the things I believe, like, “Is there a past life? If you’re feeling empty in the real world why might that be?” Or, I love physics, so questions about that too. You know, just really about the bigger scope of ideas, which help me make my music.
LUNA: I'll definitely keep that in mind for interviews going forward! And hopefully the people who interview you next can look at the bottom of this article and get some question ideas from it.
VALENTINE: That would be kind of great! I think I will definitely point them here if I can.
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