Interview with Valentiger
MCR did some catching up with Grand Rapids’s Valentiger, who are Brent (guitar), Eric (bass), and Scott (drums).
You had to whittle your band down to a duo while your bassist Eric was studying overseas– is it a relief to be three again?
Brent: For me, I like to think of the band operating equally in any formation. It’s important to me that I write songs that are able to stand alone with me and a guitar, work with drums guitar and vocals, or all three members adding their style. When we choose songs for our albums this idea is a large part of what we consider. Is it going to be the lyrics that make the song what it is? The guitar part, a drum beat or something we can’t reproduce live? And if the later is the case, then we will have to rework the song and make it interesting in a way different from the album’s recording. But all in all, something about the song should transcend the studio and we consider it a challenge to make any of the songs work in a one, two or three-person format.
Eric: I think for Brent and Scott, who spent the four months as a duo, it was a way to become better acquainted with playing the songs live, as they were having to look at them from an acoustic duo angle rather than a full electric band. In that way it helped, but overall, we would all rather be playing as three.
Valentiger plays a lot in your native Grand Rapids area, but the July 24th at the Cadieux Café is your sole Detroit date this summer. Living on the other side of the state, is it hard to make connections here?
Scott: We are going to try and keep adding more dates in the Detroit area. It takes time to make good connections with the right people though. The Valentiger name is pretty young, so we are just trying to build our name the right way by playing shows that are good for the venue, our band, and the people who come out. With the surge of booking over the internet and checking “how many Facebook friends are coming” to the show I think it’s getting harder to make those tight connections with real people. It’s not just Grand Rapids and Detroit, it’s everywhere. People are becoming overwhelmed with technology.
Brent: It’s become so easy to say “yes,” no,” “maybe” or even to revoke promises. There are no faces – even on the phone – but at least it’s harder to say “no” from your mouth. That’s why I feel it’s important to get out there and play as many shows as possible – especially touring other states. Streaming your music on the Internet is like Band High School– you are basically obligated to do it, and after that it’s up to you how much further you’re going to take it and what you’re going to do with it. And you’re going to pay. You’d better graduate from that and start touring, playing out and working on contacts. We work hard at being independent because it is hard. But I’m not sure we’d have it any other way at this point. We’re not going to pay anyone else to book us when we will probably work harder for free – we’ve tried a few of those angles.
New York City is great, but we’ve gotten just as good of a response in Rochester where that record executive’s cousin probably lives. Overall, it’s important to get the music, name and faces out there in different states. We’ve been to Canada, over to most of the upper east coast, down to Texas and back and even one short trip out to Los Angeles. But we’ve been taking a new approach of concentrating more shows in a smaller area. It makes more sense for an independent band with a budget.
I see you have a bit of a southern U.S. leg to the tour as well. How important to you is it to get your songs to other states?
Scott: I do a majority of our booking, and I find that nationally touring helps our band grow. Every tour we learn something new. We treat every show as an opportunity to meet new listeners. Even a show that is attended by a few can harvest some loyal fans and interesting opportunities. In South Bend we played a show at a small coffee shop for 3 people. It ended up that one of the girls working liked us enough to help set us up opening for Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s at The University of Notre Dame. I don’t know if this “southern leg” will produce anything like that, but I’m also not worried about it. We are just out there trying to be who we are and play the music we play. I feel that if we just do that the opportunities will follow.
You changed your name recently from “Happy Hour”. Was that just to make it easier to search for the band on the Internet? Or did you not want to be pigeonholed as a ‘bar band’?
Scott: It was time. We’d been fighting that name since our first few bar shows. When we came up with the name we were still in High School and didn’t really understand what “Happy Hour” was. We actually became very popular under that name in Grand Rapids, and it was hard to back out and change it. As we toured we noticed the band name really did not do us justice for name recognition and we were even fooled by a few listings in magazines and in papers. We tried for a few months to come up with a new name, and most of the ideas we had sounded like retirement homes, like “Welcome Sunshine Haven”… ha. Valentiger was mentioned, we laughed, moved on, and then came back to it.
Brent: It’s really just an ambiguous word that I had come up with somewhere down the line that seemed to leave a good feeling with all three members at one of many meetings over the “new name crisis.” We’d played for over six years under the name Happy Hour and it was hard for us to change it (though in the back of our mind we assumed it would need to be done). But a giant criterion was also that it would not run us into the same problems of invisibility that Happy Hour brought. All in all, we set a deadline and Valentiger was at the top of the ladder.
A vinyl release of Power Lines To Electric Times is still forthcoming, though the CD came out early this year. Why is it important that it gets a vinyl release?
Brent: Tapes were the big thing when I was growing up and they were great for their portability – and still analog. Then CD’s were a great jump in sound quality and they took me through middle, high school and college. And after that the MP3 pretty much took it all way too far into convenience and even farther from feeling and warmth. No matter what format comes out, I just prefer to go back to my vinyl collection. It’s made up of my parent’s records that I listened to while growing up and also purchases that I still make. There’s something about the physicality of playing the recording that I like and, it goes without saying, the warm sound quality.
And that’s why we record as much in the analog format as we can. There’s hissing on the Power Lines To Electric Times CD because we put a lot of the drums, guitars and vocals to tape, through a 24-track, analog board. If we had an awesome amount of money to spend we’d keep it all analog, but we did need to master on a computer at the end of the line. Nevertheless, we achieved a pretty good warm sound, and when mastered to vinyl, it hits the spot for us. It’s not hip for us and we don’t make much money on them – I can tell you that! If we want to go down that route we’ll start printing our band name vertically and off center on our T-shirts.
There are some interesting credited instruments on Power Lines To Electric Times– a typewriter and a broom. How did that come about? Is that from some sort of artistic philosophy that anything can be an instrument?
Brent: We’ve always benefited from recording on our own time, for free – mostly thanks to our long-time friend and producer, Steve Holsinger. And what comes along with such a great opportunity is the chance to exhaust ideas and be creative in the studio. Songs will be recorded in the demo stage three times, almost every time (once when I write it, again when I tinker with structure, then with the band when we first begin the early stages of a new album, and then finally we shoot for the master take). During the first two demos, I might be recording in my bedroom with an acoustic guitar and just use whatever is laying around to add percussion or any other sounds – a lot of times it ends up sticking. When I first recorded “Never Ready,” I wanted to complete the song so badly that I made a pair of brushes out of paintbrush handles and wire. The demo of “Man on Fire” featured a vinyl suitcase for a kick drum and the beginning of “Aboveboard” on is the original demo, with the tape machine remote clicking throughout. It just grew on Scott (drums) as the introduction to the song, and it ended up being the start to the whole finished product.
Also on the record, you can hear traffic going by our house/studio and the birds that went crazy during the spring time sessions. I think that we do have a “philosophy” that anything can be an instrument, and it goes right along with us not being diminished as a two-piece and touring – we see everything as an opportunity and a challenge. Exhausting all ideas before making a decision might be my thing, but the band is always brewing interesting ideas. The typewriter on “Aboveboard” could have easily been a hit on the bell of a cymbal. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t – and we don’t keep it if it doesn’t sound good to us. We’re not being weird for the sake of being weird, but we like to include original sounds that maybe someone hasn’t heard on a recording before. It’s just always been something we’ve done.
On our first professional release, we used a water bottle filled with corn for a shaker on a song called “Summer’s Gone,” and on the Magnet Heart Conveyor track, “In Your Head,” we played a set of car keys in the percussion break down. I think these things add a bit of an organic and natural feel, using objects from everyday life, while giving the songs their own personality in the studio.
You guys recently got mentioned in a strange place– on the news page on the Smashing Pumpkins’ website, in response to your “Billy Corgan theory” quote in an interview. So the theory goes, if you can’t picture the performer playing a song in gym shorts, it obviously sacrifices substance for style. Did you guys come up with that?
Brent: We DID come up with the Billy Corgan Theory, but in a much more nonchalant way than it’s seeming. We’re good at coming up with these ideas that are half joke and half guideline and it works for us. It really did start as just a joke when I referred Scott to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and he saw the softer side of the Pumpkins. However, that picture of Corgan just kind of stuck and made a bit of sense for us.
Can you really not picture Billy chilling out and playing “1979” in his PJ’s? I actually can for that song, but admittedly not for a lot of the stuff that came after that.
Scott: Yes, I can picture Billy in some mesh shorts. I just take it as a guide to remind myself to not take the band too seriously. And despite all of my rage, my friend, I am still just a rat in a cage.
** Valentiger plays this Friday, July 24th at the Cadieux Café in Detroit with Chris Richards & The Subtractions