A Chat With Valley Taylor About “One Hundred Billion Points Of Light”

Q: Hi! Every songwriter has a “graveyard” folder of abandoned voice memos, half-baked loops, and weird synth tests. When you were sifting through all your raw ideas for One Hundred Billion Points of Light, what was the indicator that a track was actually worth keeping versus something that belonged in the trash? 

A: I think the biggest indicator was whether there was still something in the idea that bothered me in a good way. It didn’t necessarily have to be a good recording or even a complete song. Sometimes it was just a melody, a sound, or ten seconds of something that I kept wanting to hear again. If I could leave it alone for a while and still feel curious about it when I came back, there was probably a song hiding in there. The things that disappeared from my brain as soon as I closed the session usually stayed dead. 

Q: You built this record during a period of real life transition—shifting routines, changing environments, moving your space. How much of the grey, hazy mood on this album came from actually trying to write that atmosphere, versus it just naturally bleeding into the microphones because of where your head was at? 

A: I think most of it just bled into the record. I definitely have sounds and textures I’m drawn to, but I wasn’t sitting down thinking, “I need to make this album feel grey and foggy.” A lot of my surroundings and routines were changing while I was making it, and I think the record ended up documenting that without me consciously trying to document it. By the time I could step outside of it and hear the atmosphere as a whole, it was already there. 

Q: Some producers treat guest features like sacred performances you can’t touch, but you chopped up, re-amped, and mangled your friends’ raw stems until they almost turned into new instruments. How do you navigate that boundary between honoring what someone else played and pulling it into your own strange digital universe? 

A: I really love when somebody gives me something that I never would have played myself, because that’s the whole reason I wanted another person involved in the first place. I try to preserve the personality of what they did even if the actual sound gets completely transformed. Sometimes a part ends up chopped apart, reversed, distorted, re-amped, or buried under something else, but the original performance is still the DNA of that sound. To me, honoring somebody’s contribution doesn’t necessarily mean keeping it pristine. It means letting the thing they brought to the song change where the song goes. 

Q: There’s this constant tug-of-war on the record where a track starts as a fragile, naked melody, but then gets wrapped in these massive, dense walls of texture. Was there ever a point where you felt like you were over-producing a track, or do you just keep adding layers until it hits a specific internal frequency? 

A: I definitely over-produce things, but sometimes I think I have to over-produce them before I understand what they actually need. I’ll keep adding sounds until the emotional shape of the song feels right, and then a lot of the work is figuring out what can disappear again. I like that tension between something really small and vulnerable being surrounded by this huge amount of noise. The goal isn’t necessarily for every layer to be clearly audible. Sometimes I just want them all pressing against each other and creating a feeling. 

Q: A lot of artists construct elaborate lore or grand concepts around an album title, but sometimes a phrase just takes over your brain and won’t leave. What does your mental space look like when a phrase like “One Hundred Billion Points of Light” starts looping in your mind while you’re just driving or making coffee? 

A: Usually a phrase like that starts feeling important before I actually understand why. I’ll repeat it to myself for weeks and start attaching different meanings to it depending on what is happening in my life. One Hundred Billion Points of Light started feeling like this image of something impossibly huge made out of an overwhelming number of tiny individual things. I liked the contradiction in that. You can feel incredibly insignificant and incredibly connected at exactly the same time. Eventually the phrase started to feel like it contained the record before I could really explain what the record was about. 

Q: Looking at your catalog over time, you’ve jumped between raw DIY spaces, ambient soundscapes, and super-detailed electronic production. What’s a studio habit or recording trick you relied heavily on three years ago that you now completely avoid? 

A: I used to be much more likely to try to solve every problem by adding something. Another layer, another plugin, another effect, another guitar. I still make very dense music, so obviously I haven’t completely cured myself of that, but now I’m much more comfortable letting something sound strange or incomplete if that strangeness is what makes it interesting. I’m also much less interested in making every performance line up perfectly. I think I trust accidents a lot more than I used to. 

Q: On “Don’t You Wanna Be Fine?”, there’s this comforting perspective about forgiving your past mistakes and realizing they didn’t actually ruin anything. Is writing a song like that an act of self-convincing in real time, or do you only write those lyrics once you’ve already found peace with it? 

A: It’s usually self-convincing. I don’t think I’m very good at writing songs about things that I’ve completely figured out already. By that point I’m normally not interested in talking about them anymore. With “Don’t You Wanna Be Fine?” I think I was trying to get myself to accept that you can make mistakes, hurt people, embarrass yourself, take the wrong path, and still eventually end up somewhere okay. The song is probably more of an argument I was having with myself than a conclusion I had already reached. 

Q: Between coding custom web pages, designing art, and tweaking mixes, you build a huge visual and interactive world around your music. When you’re stuck on a mix or a lyric, does switching over to a visual medium help unlock the audio side, or do they feel like completely separate parts of your brain? 

A: They’re very connected for me. If I stare at a mix for too long, eventually I stop being able to tell what I’m hearing, so working on a video, drawing something, or messing with a webpage lets me stay inside the world of the record without directly working on the song. A lot of times I’ll understand what a song is supposed to feel like visually before I understand what it needs musically. Then I can go back to the mix with a much clearer idea of what belongs there. 

Q: Taking songs that were born as bedroom voice memos and scaling them up for big venue stages—like opening for heavy acts like Underoath—forces a complete translation. What’s the hardest part about taking these intricate, layered studio creations and making them feel physical in a loud room? 

A: The hardest part is accepting that the live version can’t just be the recording played louder. There are so many tiny sounds on these records that only really make sense through headphones, and if you try to reproduce every single one of them live you can end up with something technically accurate but completely lifeless. I think the challenge is deciding which parts actually carry the emotional weight of the song and making those things physical. Sometimes that means a guitar has to become much bigger than it was on the recording, or a texture becomes part of the backing tracks while the band concentrates on the things that need human movement and energy. 

Q: You’ve talked before about leaving imperfection in the recordings instead of polishing everything until it’s sterile. In an era where AI and hyper-quantized production can make everything sound pitch-perfect, how do you preserve that human, rough-around-the-edges magic? 

A: Mostly by resisting the urge to correct something just because I technically can. If a vocal moves slightly around the beat, a guitar squeaks, somebody breathes loudly, or two parts rub against each other in a strange way, I try to ask whether it actually sounds bad or whether I’ve just been trained to think it needs fixing. I use plenty of digital tools, so I’m not trying to pretend I’m making records in 1972. I just don’t think precision and emotion are the same thing. Sometimes the tiny mistake is the thing that proves somebody was actually there. 

Q: To wrap us up: Once this album is fully out in the world, what does the rest of the year look like for you—are you stepping back to breathe, or already jumping into the next rabbit hole?

A: Probably both. I want to give this album some room to exist and keep building out the visual side of it, playing shows, and making things around the songs rather than immediately treating the release date like the end of the project. I’ve also been really interested in making a proper found-footage short after playing with that idea in the video and website for “Dog.” But I know myself well enough to know there will also be another recording session open on my computer before very long. I’m terrible at actually finishing one rabbit hole before finding another one.