Valley wondered if it was a sign. After nearly a decade together, having met as Burlington high school kids in two separate groups in a double-booked studio mishap, guitarist Mickey Brandolino told them he was leaving to pursue other goals as a music producer.
"We were like, 'Hey, we don't know if we should keep doing this,'" frontman Rob Laska remembers telling COIN bandleader Chase Lawrence, executive producer of the newly released Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden, pantomiming the sleepless disorientation of the moment while on Zoom with Exclaim!
Later that same week, while stranded in Charlotte, NC, the band's remaining members — Laska, drummer Karah James and bassist Alex DiMauro — wrote a song called "Bass Player's Brother," an Americana love story narrative that allowed them to emotionally detach from the situation a bit. In doing so, they captured a quintessential Valley energy with its driving, open-chorded chorus and simplistic-on-the-surface lyrics painting the cyclical nature of heartbreak through generations.
"It was the first time, I think, as a band, we had to grieve something together," Laska reflects on putting the song — and themselves — together at a rented house with Lawrence, who had driven down to meet them. "We had to process really feeling just kind of abandoned, but also feeling so proud and so supportive of our friend who felt like he needed to move on."
He asks, "Who are we to hold someone back when they want to chase something they've been dreaming of chasing since they were a little kid?"
It was the beginning of Valley learning, as the singer-songwriter puts it, "how to get in a room and not feel the emptiness of [Brandolino] not being there as much, and be like, 'We're still here, and that's okay. We can do this, We're worthy of being here still — and we should be here. We belong here.'"
Laska says, half-jokingly, that the band have a habit of predicting their own future. "Every era, there's always been one little thing that translates and, like, starts the whole next thing," he explains, and there's no clearer example than the earliest seeds of Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden being sewn back in 2021 during a particularly fruitful two-day writing session that produced "Like 1999," the lead single from Valley's Last Birthday EP and their most-streamed song.
During the writing process in late January, they had posted a 26-second TikTok of the chorus demo — a snippet that went viral and became even more inescapable on the platform when they invited people to share their verse ideas. Valley promised to release the song in full when their original video hit a million views, and quickly had to deliver.
It was in that same session that they penned the title track of Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden, the demo for which Laska says felt like a beacon of hope when they revisited it in November 2023 while opening for Dermot Kennedy's arena tour. "That title and concept has been in the back of our heads the past year, especially after touring Lost in Translation," he explains of the band's previous full-length, released just last summer. "We just thought about that song a lot and, yeah, it just felt right. It felt like the tiny seed that we planted years ago."
Now, he describes the singalong nostalgia-pop of "Like 1999" as "such a different world" for Valley. "We're still so grateful we took the 'Like 1999' path, because it took us to places and things happened, and it was a special moment," Laska reflects of the viral fame, but adds, "It's been very nice to be here now, and to live to tell the tale. I think it's a lesson for us — and a lesson for everyone — to follow your gut and intuition, but don't be afraid to just try things."
The band's innate curiosity was a key component captured on the new album, which finds them paring back the meticulous approach they took to the drawn-out process of writing and producing Lost in Translation. "This record is just like, 'Oh, that's Valley in a room,'" Laska says, "just kind of hitting stuff and turning knobs."
"Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden" was actually the last song to come together during Valley and Lawrence's month-long stint at a makeshift cabin studio in the Smoky Mountains this past February, having recorded and scrapped it numerous times until the final day of making the album. "We ended up tracking the song mostly live, and that's what you hear on the record," the frontman says of the title track. "I think that's the magic of having finally arrived at the feeling that we were chasing for so many years with that song."
Finishing that song meant finishing an album that Laska looks at as a time capsule of three bandmates — and, moreover, friends — processing the loss of not only Brandolino from the group, but also other big life changes in their late 20s. "It was the first time as a band we looked at each other and were like, 'Oh, you're not 17 anymore. We're like, growing up together in this thing and we need to address that a little bit," he says." And the resultant body of work is "about having something to say and capturing it as honestly as possible."
He adds, "There were some days at the cabin where we were so out of it and didn't want to write. We learned how to just hang out again, and go for a walk, and make dinner, and just talk about it. We learned a lot about love."
Despite encapsulating a difficult transitional period, the undertone of Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden is overwhelmingly hopeful. From the countrified, near-midwest emo breakdown of "Growing (Apart)" to the Petty-esque harmonica-anthem "When You Know Someone," Valley ground their sound in organic treatments that lean more live-off-the-floor and emphasize guitars over synths. They're a band who have spent a lot of time dabbling in production and studio wizardry, dating all the way back to that double-booked studio in high school. In those days, Laksa was already making more cross-border inroads than are often seen within the Canadian music community, which he already understood could be in a bit of a separate bubble from the US.
"I was a teenager, and I happened to have [Arkells' debut album] Jackson Square in my backpack. And I went to see the Maine because I loved the Maine in high school, and I just happened to give it to John [O'Callaghan]," he laughs now, calling his spur-of-the-moment teenage decision "silly" and dumb" in hindsight, but maintaining reverence for the fact that he just loved that record and wanted to share it with people. It resulted in the Maine inviting Arkells to open for them stateside in 2012 — and Arkells inviting Valley to open for some of their upcoming arena shows this fall in between their own headlining North American dates.
They also just played Budweiser Stage for the first time, opening for longtime pals the Beaches, who Laska calls "truly the hardest working band [he's] ever met." He explains, "Everyone is just so kind, and I really am proud of the community we've built locally here — because these are all bands and artists that are breaking Canada and touring the world, but there's such a hometown camaraderie."
This sense of gratitude permeates throughout Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden, even while Valley contend with the overwhelming realization that they aren't the same band they were at 17, or even a year ago. The now-trio maybe predicted their own future yet again with the "Go Your Own Way"-inspired "Either Way, I'm Going Your Way" on Lost in Translation, but their Fleetwood Mac references have a newfound on the '70s soft rocker "A Little More," which name-checks "Everywhere" and "You Make Loving Fun."
You could say that this album is something like Valley's Rumours, but with one key exception: "The band is back together," Laska rejoices on the bridge, "The band is back together!"