A Chat With: Valley Maker
Photo by Bree Burchfield
For many of us, 2020 and the early part of 2021 consisted of spending more time at home than any other year of our lives. When the world shut down, we had time to ponder about our community and sense of belonging, all the while doing our best to readjust in a time of constant uncertainty and doubt.
For singer-songwriter Austin Crane, these themes have remained a consistent study of his in recent years while he obtained a doctorate in human geography at the University of Washington, and during the creation of his latest studio album for his musical project Valley Maker. After settling into a new home and finding their footing in the city of Seattle for several years, Crane and his wife made the decision to journey back east to their native state of South Carolina in early 2019. Written around the time of that journey to put roots down again in Columbia, South Carolina, When the Day Leaves captures Crane’s observations and musings around this major life move.
On top of the lifestyle and location shift, Crane’s move just before the pandemic prompted him to contemplate even deeper questions and even provided additional perspectives to some of the songs on When the Day Leaves.
Just before Crane and his band departed on the first Valley Maker tour in nearly two years, we had the chance to chat about his big move, the cathartic nature of his songwriting, and what to expect at his upcoming shows. Tune in below.
ANCHR Magazine: Going back to the beginning, what do you remember as your first musical memory that got you interested in creating it?
Austin Crane: I grew up in a pretty musical family. My dad always played guitar while I was growing up and my mom played piano. So they got me into piano lessons as a kid, and I also grew up in the church in a small town in South Carolina where singing was a big part of that tradition on a weekly basis. I took piano lessons but didn’t really connect with it mainly because I wasn’t interested in the songs. I was listening to Nirvana and learning how to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
Yeah there’s quite a disconnect between those two!
Yeah, then I got my first guitar for my 13th birthday. I really fell in love with it, and the cool thing about the guitar is that I could learn songs that I listened to, and that was a catalyst for me. I spent a lot of my middle school and high school years in my bedroom with guitar tabs, and playing CDs in my boombox along with a guitar. Three things about what I said just dated me pretty badly!
I think that was when I fell in love with playing music. I was lucky enough that even though I was in a small Carolina town, I had a couple other friends who got guitars around the same time. For whatever reason we all started to write songs and share them with each other and get some bands together. There wasn’t even really anywhere to play, but we would play in our garages. Having that community at an early age, I think that continues to be really important to me and the reason why I love music. For the collaborative aspect and the people that it continues to bring into my life.
Very cool, it’s great to be able to play the music you want rather than learn something unrelated.
Yeah exactly, and to use it as a songwriting tool and express myself through my own songs. Then share that with other people… From ages 13-15, there was a lot of discovery and euphoria around that process.
More recently, you studied human geography at University of Washington I was curious if you’ve noticed a connection there about how those studies have impacted the way you write and observe people for your songwriting?
Yeah, I actually just finished my PhD a couple of weeks ago, and it’s such a relief! Music and academia and pursuing this degree for the last 9 or so years of my life have been co-existing pursuits. I started this geography program and Valley Maker was technically already a project, but I wasn’t touring at all or releasing music beyond putting it online. That started happening when I moved to Seattle. For a long time, these were side by side pursuits and I think that they informed one another. I think a lot of the same reasons why I wanted to study geography are probably—not probably—they certainly were reasons why I was starting to write songs. There’s a question that I want to pursue an answer to or something that happened that I need to make sense of; Something about humanity or the inequality of the world, or the human experience that I wanted to dig into further. My research was on human geography and migration in particular. I think there are some literal or more direct lines I could draw with the new record that engage with specific political ideas around migration or borders. There are definitely some moments of immediate connections, but I think at the level of who I am as a person and why I like both of these things is that they are both avenues to explore questions and meditate on some of the mysteries of life and dig into that a little deeper.
Totally. It’ll be interesting to see if you notice a shift in your songwriting now that you finished your PhD.
For sure, and I’m still doing some teaching here. I moved to Columbia, South Carolina about two years ago now. It feels like the pandemic year didn’t happen…in my mind I lived in Seattle last month, but it was about two years ago now. I’m doing some teaching here [in Columbia] and working at the university. I’m keeping one foot in that world, and they’re nice enough to let me go on tour sometimes. I plan to continue to put out music and keep that part of my life.
That leads perfectly to my next question! I was going to ask about When the Day Leaves being written around that move from Seattle to Columbia. Do you think writing those songs around that period of time helped you process the journey and that big move, and acted like a therapeutic outlet?
Oh for sure, I definitely think so. It was the right move to make for a lot of reasons for my life and my wife’s life, and the life we’re building together, but it was hard to leave. I love Seattle as a city and I have a lot of pretty deep music communities and friendships there. I also really love the natural environment of Seattle. It was a very inspiring place to walk my dog and take everything in.
My wife and I are both from South Carolina and all of our family is here and as you can probably imagine, it’s so much more affordable here than Seattle as well. So we’d thrown out the idea of moving back eventually to this area. My wife is a mid-wife and she got a perfect job offer in Columbia. It’s a city where we have a lot of friends, it’s affordable and it’s actually pretty cool. It felt like when she got that job offer, this is the time to do it. So it raised a lot of questions around community and place and home and belonging and what the future holds. I would say a lot of it was that I was already sitting with this transitional period, and that kind of fell right into the pandemic.
Even the idea of going on tour next week, it’s like wow, I’m going to have some structure around music again. We’re going to be traveling. For 2018 and 2019 I was doing that almost nonstop but I haven’t for awhile. That was a bit of a tangent, but I think the record was the primary way that I processed a lot of that experience. I’ve always written songs about what it means to be alive and some of these bigger questions about place and family and belonging. Music has always been an avenue to explore those kind of things. I think the move back home, even though it was the right move, in a way it wasn’t easy and raised a lot of things to process around that. Songwriting has always been, and certainly was in this move, a way to sit with these questions that didn’t have easy answers. Some of the songs, like “Mockingbird” on the new record, it was written before the pandemic, but that was the most fitting song for how I felt through the pandemic as well.
It’s great timing you moved right before the pandemic. I’m sure it would have been more complicated to move during 2020!
For sure, it would have been way more complicated. It was also weird because in my mind it was part of the exciting thing about moving here. I made the record When the Day Leaves in 2019, just a couple months before the pandemic started. I guess it was starting to happen overseas but it wasn’t in The States yet. It’s interesting cause I finished that record and my label and everyone was excited to put it out, and we said let’s do this as soon as we can, so we booked a ton of tour dates and everything. Then we had this day in like March or April of 2020 where we all just got on the phone and we were like “this isn’t going to happen right now.” We ended up rescheduling those dates several times…I think these shows that I’m about to play this is the second or third time we’ve had to reschedule.
I know, I feel so bad for venues and booking agents because things just kept getting pushed back a couple months at a time and everything remained uncertain. Now with the delta variant it’s getting to feel a little like that again.
I know, it kind of feels the same way right now where the ground is falling out from under you. We decided to make the shows proof of vaccination and masked inside. I feel like that’s a lot safer. Not 100%, but it feels better and the right way to do it.
Yeah, Schubas [where Valley Maker is playing in Chicago] is requiring full vaccination proof for all shows currently. I hope with that we can continue to have live music keep going and avoid getting shut down again.
It’s so hard not to be angry about what’s happening right now especially having rescheduled everything a bunch of times, and feelings about people who are remaining unvaccinated. It makes a lot of sense to me that shows are for the people who did get vaccinated and who have done their part to take care of others.
I definitely agree, and in talking to a lot of my music scene friends here, we’ve all said we feel lucky that we tend to be the kind of people who have done the right thing.
I made that post a couple days ago [about the shows requiring vaccination] and was cringing expecting people to start a flame war with me in the comments, but it was mostly just a lot of support from people. And a reminder that I really like most of the people that come to my shows. The ones that I get to meet, I feel really fortunate that way. I’ve made a lot of friends through music. For whatever reason the people who are attracted to music and the project, I tend to have a lot of commonality with. That was a nice reminder of that.
With uncertainty being a theme around your move and then the pandemic, has the pandemic shifted your perspective or given a new meaning to any of the songs on the album besides “Mockingbird”?
In some ways I wish I could answer that after this tour because playing the songs live is one of the main ways I experience and kind of feel the songs. you know. A lot of those connection points become most resonant in the moment of performing them for whatever reason. Which was another strange thing, to put a record out and not be able to go on tour. I realized even when I was in those high school bands I mentioned, we still did a little release show if we made a record. That’s always what’s made it feel real, in the world and tangible to me. So I’m pretty excited to get to play them. I guess other songs that might have evolved or become newly resonant to me are “Branch I Bend” and “When the Day Leaves.” Both are kind of about the cyclicality of life and time and how we move through different seasons, and some things change and some things remain the same. And kind of making peace with that, that’s something I’ve always struggled with. I tend to be a restless person and I feel like the pandemic was a major force to embracing that. To embracing life as it is and to find joy in the small things. In the daily things that make our life meaningful and to practice gratitude around a lot of that stuff. With those few songs, from the place I came in writing them, I’ve experienced that in a pretty real way throughout the pandemic.
Yeah I agree with that effect from the pandemic, it was really all about finding silver linings and practicing gratitude.
Yeah, and to value the things we’re missing. Like shows, I feel like even if there’s ten people at a show and we’re all spaced out, it’s whatever needs to happen to be safe in the pandemic. I’m going to have so much joy getting to do that again. It’s such a gift to be able to play music and I’ve missed it a lot.
Exactly! I feel like before the pandemic I was starting to get very burnt out from going to shows all the time, but now being back, I’m even enjoying 2-hour sets with a fresh perspective.
I felt a little bit of the same. Living in Seattle there was just always so many shows happening. You start touring and get to know other bands and musicians, so you have friends’ shows you want to be at and should be at. I felt like in Seattle I was always going to concerts and now moving here, Columbia definitely has a cool music scene and there are venues, but it’s not in the touring circuit in nearly the same way. I’m excited to get back out there.
Definitely! So you recorded When the Day Leaves with producer Trevor Spencer back in Woodinville, Washington, right?
Yeah it’s like 30 minutes east of Seattle, it’s a beautiful spot.
What was your favorite memory or moment about the recording experience?
I have a lot of really good memories, I kind of look back on it really fondly in the sense that it was my last experience with Seattle. My wife and I had already moved to South Carolina and she started her job. We bought this super old house that needed a lot of work…it was very affordable, but also not livable, so we couldn’t move in for a couple of months while we worked on it. That was a good season for me to make the record, so I went back out to Seattle for that in Fall of 2019. That was the last experience of being in this place, at that time, with that community of musicians. The people who were involved with the record are just incredible players and people I’ve gotten to know throughout the time living there so it felt really special in that way. The final moment in that place.
I guess the other thing I would say about that experience as a whole is that I’d never made a record like that where I just plopped down in one place for three to four weeks, and just made the record in more or less one sitting. We didn’t completely finish it in the time I was there, but we got 90% of it in that consistent day-to-day process. That was really cool and I feel like it allowed me to make the kind of record I wanted to make. One of the things I’m most proud of about it is it does feel pretty cohesive as a world of music and an environment that you kind of enter into. That’s something I’m always trying to do with creating music, but I feel like approaching the recording in that way quite literally created that. I only left the studio maybe two days of the whole time I was there. I was in a beautiful place with lots of outdoor space around it. It was a very immersive, continuous experience. That was a luxurious way to make a record and Trevor’s space out there is really amazing. This is the third record we’ve worked on together. He’s one of my close friends, but I feel like we’ve got a good working dynamic as well. We were able to really enjoy the time.
Yeah, it totally translates as a listener to be cohesive and immersive.
It’s always weird to say things I like about my own music, but I listen back to it and it feels continuous.
Yeah, you should have pride in your work! You’ve also worked with Amy Godwin on a lot of your music. How did you start working with her?
Getting to play music with Amy is such a gift. She’s a pretty incredible singer and very talented harmony writer. She teaches choir for her work, so her brain very much works that way as far as how to fill a space or create a mood with harmonies. I feel like we met on a whim somewhat. When I was in college here in Columbia, she was living in Georgia and we got put on a bill together somewhat randomly. I walked into the venue as her set was starting and I was totally blown away. I was like, this is one of the best singers I’ve ever heard. I was working on the first Valley Maker record at that point and had already thought I wanted it to have a dual vocal quality. I always want my music to be a little bit sparse at times and remain dynamic, and I really like the idea of the harmonies creating an environment.
Yeah, your voices meld really well together.
Yeah I’m so grateful to Amy as a friend and she continues to play music and make records with me. That’s a cool question to ask ahead of this tour because Amy’s going to be able to tour with me for these shows. We’re going to do it as a duo. She usually is teaching during the academic year, and since this is in the Summer, she’ll be able to join. I’m personally super excited about it because we haven’t gotten to do it in like three or four years. I’m also excited to play Schubas. I’ve seen shows there cause I’ve got some friends in Chicago and spent a pretty good amount of time in the city.
Is there anything else about the tour you want to tease ahead of the Schubas show?
No juicy details other than Amy being involved, but the set will be most of the new record since this is kind of a release tour for that, and it will also pull from all my other records as well. There will be a mixture. Amy has been involved with all of the records so we can kind of go across a lot of the discography so to speak.