With deeply emotive guitars blending with equally evocative electronic synth textures, Valley Taylor’s latest album ‘One Hundred Billion Points of Light’ is the kind of album that asks you to put aside all that you are doing so that it can enter your heart and move it.
LITM interviews Valley Taylor about this stunningly moving album and the musical paths he has traversed to get here!
Congratulations on your new album! Could you walk us through the musical journey that got you to the sound of this album?
Thank you! I think this record came from me getting a lot less precious about what a song was supposed to be. I made somewhere around 25 demos while working on it, and a lot of them started from loops, textures, little sounds, or things I stumbled into rather than sitting down with a guitar and intentionally trying to write a song.
I had initially imagined making something a little cleaner and more pop-oriented, but the record slowly became stranger and more atmospheric as I followed whatever interested me. By the end, it actually felt like an aberration from the album I thought I was making, but in a good way.
It’s probably the clearest recording I’ve made so far, while still keeping a lot of the messiness and texture that I like about Valley Taylor.
The record feels like it could be part of a modern coming-of-age album, with its stunning indie pop-rock sound and the themes that it deals with. What were you aiming at conceptually?
I like the coming-of-age interpretation because I think there is a lot of that in there, although I wasn’t consciously trying to make a coming-of-age record.
A lot of it is about trying to understand yourself while also accepting that you might never completely understand yourself. There are ideas about memory, loss, connection, identity, disappointment, and the strange ways you change over time.
I don’t think the album is really trying to arrive at an answer. If anything, it’s about becoming a little more comfortable with being unfinished. I’ve described the record as a checkpoint before, and I still think that fits. It’s a picture of who I was and what I was interested in at that particular moment rather than some final statement about who I am.
What are the musical influences that leave an echo in the album?
Orchid Mantis was definitely a big one. I love how their music can feel intimate, degraded, beautiful and almost half-remembered at the same time.
Bon Iver has been an influence for a long time too, especially in the way sound itself can carry emotion independently of lyrics.
And honestly, things like the Minecraft soundtrack are in there as well. I’m really attracted to music that creates a place or an atmosphere that you can sort of exist inside. Sometimes I’m thinking less about genre and more about whether a sound creates a particular feeling or environment.
Which of the tracks would you say is the closest to your heart?
Probably “Spit.” It’s my favorite song on the record now, and it came together almost entirely in one day.
I had a really specific idea of what I wanted it to sound like, and I basically locked myself in the studio and kept tracking until what was coming out of the speakers matched what I could hear in my head. That doesn’t always happen for me, so when it does it feels kind of special.
It’s funny because my friend Alex, who’s a photographer from LA, had come up to stay with me and my wife that weekend, and we had plans to do a bunch of things together. I had to be a little antisocial because I felt this real urgency to finish the song while it was still so clear in my head.
I also really love the video I made for it. It feels like a snapshot of my life in the Bay Area now—the house, all the weird little trinkets, drawings and pieces of art I’m surrounded by. In that way, the song and the video together feel especially personal to me.
The album seems to follow an arc. Talk to us a little bit about the same?
I’m glad it feels that way, because the sequencing was important to me, although I don’t think of it as a literal narrative.
To me it starts with a lot of movement and uncertainty and gradually becomes more reflective. There are moments where things feel huge and dramatic and other moments where everything collapses inward.
By the end I don’t think the character—or me, really—has solved anything. There’s just a little more acceptance. I’m generally suspicious of stories where someone reaches the end and suddenly understands themselves completely. Life has never felt that neat to me.
So the arc is probably less about resolution and more about moving through something and coming out slightly different on the other side.
What was the creative process like when you were putting this album together?
Very exploratory. I made a lot more material than I needed and basically allowed myself to chase whatever sounded interesting without worrying too much about whether it belonged on an album yet.
Eventually I had around 25 demos, and the eight songs on the record were honestly selected largely because they were the ones I kept wanting to hear again.
My live band ended up becoming part of the recording world too. Geoff Nelson and Devin Zamora contributed, and David Hollenbeck programmed drums and helped me a lot throughout the process. Alec Beretz mastered the record.
I still did a huge amount of it alone, but having people around whose instincts I trust made the finished album much better. The process was less about executing a master plan and more about discovering what the record was while I was making it.
What excites you about the future regarding your musical and artistic pursuits?
What excites me most right now is actually letting everything expand beyond just releasing music.
I love making records, but Valley Taylor has gradually become connected to drawing, animation, film, design, websites and a lot of other things I make. I’m increasingly interested in treating all of those things as parts of the same practice rather than thinking of myself strictly as a musician.
I also recently started Atlas Exploding, where I interview and document other artists, and that has opened up another direction that I’m really excited about.
Musically, I’m actually trying not to immediately rush into another release. I want to spend some time revisiting and modernizing parts of my older catalog, playing shows, and giving this album room to exist.
I think at this point I’m less interested in constantly reaching the next milestone and more interested in seeing where making things takes me.
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