77 fans
It didn’t take long for Hollywood to transform the hyphen from punctuation symbol to one of ultimate status: a not-so-secret shortcut for artists looking to oversell their talent. For Valentina, however, a hyphen surplus is nothing short of necessity. Only a masochist would articulate the singer(-)songwriter(- )musician(-)model(-)photographer’s cache without frequent breath-catching pauses, because none of those titles should be omitted when describing the young virtuoso. Valentina is the definitive multi- hyphenate.
Although, that wasn’t always her plan. Her visions of superstardom were derived from an obsession with jazz (introduced by her Brazilian father), but despite her upbringing in the aspiring entertainer’s mecca, the LA-native’s entry into industry was by no means guaranteed. So, she pivoted: capitalizing on her aptitude in other creative fields as a means to make it in music. She became a professional photographer, shooting hot new restaurants and Ford agency signees to fund her budding singing career. She utilized modeling to teach herself how to better market herself as an artist — all before finishing high school.
“I was writing songs religiously, and thought, Let’s just do the damn thing right now,” Valentina says of pursuing music as an adolescent. “I was releasing music and trying to navigate my way through the industry in high school — without knowing anybody in it. For me, the ‘college experience’ was five years of learning how music worked.”
That education encompassed learning the piano and guitar, and singing in jazz bands. More recently, she was selected by Mike Posner to attend his exclusive development course to learn production under industry leaders, something she claims “changed her life,” as female artists are so rarely offered the opportunity to enhance their technical knowledge — now, she’s a bonafide producer (another hyphen to add).
“There aren’t many artists in my life who have done for me what he has,” she claims of Posner. “Women so often don’t get taken seriously as producers, and it’s not okay. We know what we want. Now I know the language and how my music should sound.”
Valentina has been striving for sonic originality since her youth. Unraveling and reassembling the chords of her favorite songs, a teenaged Valentina sought to hybridize jazz and pop. She remembers desperately attempting as a 10-year-old to achieve the vocal range of her idols, Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald. When she didn’t get into a performing arts program in high school, Valentina reconfigured her devastation as determination: “It would’ve been easy to just give up, but I just became even more convinced that nothing was going to stop me. That was very important, I needed to learn that you can fail and keep going.”
Kept going, she did. Now, Valentina’s octave-spanning voice melts into the lower register with ease, before floating into falsetto in the same breath. The result is “organic soul-pop with a country twang,” most evident on her alluringly lush new single “Bad.” The singer approaches every area of her artistry with the same ambitious autonomy, and as such the hyphens have come in handy. All her artwork is self-shot, and her older sister, a talented filmmaker, produces every visual — which often resemble postcards of sun-kissed nostalgia.
Perhaps this ‘DIY’ mentality is to blame for Valentina’s tendency to be imposter syndromic. Even when photographing pop princess Ciara, Valentina tried to avoid divulging her own musical ambitions. She has fended off the advances of major labels for much of her career — wanting to understand her vision before subscribing to theirs — before signing to Island Records this year. Now, she knows exactly who Valentina is: master-of-every-trade, but limited to none.
“I never want to censor myself. I want to share every detail of being broken up, overcoming challenges, navigating life and be extremely honest. Just leave it all out on the table. I want to be 1000 percent me.”
