So Let’s Stay Here Hazy: A Review of Sam Valdez’s Mirage By Jessie Janeshek

“So Let’s Stay Here Hazy”: A Review of Sam Valdez’s Mirage


Sam Valdez lives in California and grew up in Nevada; much of the writing on her songs notes this and associates her work with the open desert. Yet the thick, heady music on her new EP Mirage is an appropriate soundscape for taking long walks through the humid woods at dusk while you let Valdez’s meditations linger in the heavy air with your own. Since Mirage was released on June 29, I’ve been doing just that.

Valdez’s work, dubbed “shoegaze meets Americana” by Consequence of Sound,  is often compared to Lana Del Rey, Mazzy Star, and Angel Olson; she said in an interview that “Angel Olsen was the first artist I got into that had this low, broad vocal quality that made me feel more comfortable to sing in my natural deeper tone of voice.” However, Valdez’s training as a classical violinist also lends a unique intricacy to her music, which is simultaneously gritty and carefully-wrought, intimate yet coolly balanced.

As a broody type, I’m particularly drawn to the paradox of self-destruction and self-reflection in these songs, the lyrics that are hypnotic and tantalizing, that snake themselves around you. I also love the fact that, though Valdez’s lyrics explore relationships with other people, they are self-centered, and I mean that as a compliment. Relationships are catalysts for introspection.
 
In the first single off the EP, “It’s Alright,” she sings: “I know if I go back to you I’ll die. You’ve been gone for months, but you’re burning my mind…Now there’s only dirt where a garden was/love grew so fast just to die so young/so you left me sleeping in my party clothes/keeping with this feeling before I let go.” “Farther Away” opens with a line I wish I had written in a poem: “You’re like a dream I had once, then you got drunk and drove off.”  Later in the song, Valdez sings she’s “filling this space by wanting more/living in this fog and all of my branches are breaking off.” In “Other Side,” she’s “been digging up everyone else’s grave just to look for you…so let’s stay here hazy…it’s better than knowing the truth.” Meanwhile, “Carnival,” which begins with a vintage-feeling vinyl crackle, navigates similar territory more wryly with its refrain: “You’re a shitty prize at a carnival/I want you back but I don’t know why….”
 
Valdez cites Sylvia Plath as an influence, and certainly Plath’s ghost swirls through the luscious Sturm und Drang in the songs mentioned above. I’m also very intrigued by the solipsistic mood of Valdez’s songs, especially “Funeral;” to me it recalls Plath’s poems “Mad Girl’s Love Song” (“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead/I think I made you up inside my head”) and “Soliloquy of the Solipsist.” Solipsism, or the idea that the only thing that can be proven is the existence of one’s own mind or self, probably sounds negative to most; however in “Funeral” it’s a coping mechanism, solipsism as self-defense, mind over matter, and something, for better or for worse, I very much relate to.
 
“Funeral” confronts death by dealing with how the one left behind processes the loss; the song repeatedly begs the deceased to “just stay alive in mind.” This idea that the dead will live as long as she “[makes them] up inside her head” is interwoven with grieving spread over time (“At your parents’ house your picture’s in the kitchen/I feel like throwing up every single Christmas”) and the chance for short-term comfort in the form of a one-night stand: “Summer heat is hot but I don’t want to show my legs/it could make for a fun night if I go and sleep with him.” But she opts to not sleep with him perhaps because it might lead to more emotional investment; as she sings in my favorite lines from the EP, “I’m loyal to my solitude and I don’t want to lose it/and all my pretty plants would die just waiting for some music.” It’s tender, moody, beautiful, and weird, a perfect sonic backdrop for being alone but not lonely and perhaps for even cherishing your loneliness.


​Keep up with Sam Valdez via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Listen to Other Side from Mirage below.
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Jessie Janeshek's second full-length book of poetry is The Shaky Phase (Stalking Horse Press, 2017). Her chapbooks are Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish (Grey Book Press, 2016), Rah-Rah Nostalgia (dancing girl press, 2016), Supernoir (Grey Book Press, 2017), Auto-Harlow (Shirt Pocket Press, 2018), and Hardscape (Reality Beach, forthcoming). Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010) is her first full-length collection. Read more at jessiejaneshek.net. 

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