Valerie has never been content to live the way anyone else wants her to. Which is why, when her peers were obsessing over Britney, Christina, BSB and NSYNC, she was looking to the past, to her parents' record collection. The Monkees were her boy band of choice. Her failure to fit in resulted in having few friends beyond the notebook she always seemed to have at her disposal. Until she was a teenager, music and writing were two separate facets of her life. Music was more of an obligation than a chore, as she was forced into piano and trumpet lessons, and despite the fact that she didn't believe it, someone thought she had a passably decent voice and thus thrust her into singing at church. Valerie relentlessly begged for a guitar at the age of 13, which was purchased under the agreement that she would teach herself how to play. So she did, looking up tabs for her favorite songs and learning how to play them by ear. At the age of 15, everything changed. Music now was a passion, and transitioning from horrible teenaged poetry to songwriting seemed like the next step. Michelle Branch's "Everywhere" was a big hit that year, and her love of the song and the fact that a fellow teenager was writing her own songs, telling her own stories, made Valerie want to do the exact same thing. The songs kept coming, and as the years have gone by, Valerie has gone from being a singer-songwriter to much more. She is a multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and producer. She plays guitar (acoustic and electric), bass, piano, ukulele, mandolin, as well as the other instruments she has lying around (didgeridoo, autoharp, harmonica). Valerie's songs tell stories of loneliness, of pain, of being misunderstood, of lost love, and of self-discovery. Her first EP, Pulled by the Tides, was recorded in a studio in Ardmore and was released in 2012. Two more EPs followed in 2016, both of which were recorded entirely on her own out of her one-bedroom apartment. The first, With an Asterisk, was a year-long labor of love, on which she played and sang every note on layered arrangements to breathe new life into songs that were previously only imagined on solo acoustic guitar or piano. The second, almost bare: the acoustic sessions, was recorded entirely in her bathroom, featuring stripped-down arrangements that were recorded in single takes for a "live" feel.