With a hit single on the Charts, High Valley has finally broken through by returning to what got them to the dance in the first place; organic sounding songs with tight harmony and interesting melodies. In our conversation they dig deeper into how they’ve evolved into the band that’s just released Dear Life to stores everywhere.
Matt Bjorke: How would you compare the growth from your early records to now?
Brad Rempel - For us we feel like every year has been a slight increase but obviously from signing to Warner Bros to where we are now today — release week — and a lot more people have gotten a chance to know the band. The difference on this album was that we used to try very hard to match what someone else was doing on country radio — never consciously — but with this record we blended harmonies and bluegrass and acoustic stuff and kept it real simple and didn’t try too hard. This record is a return to our roots and blends what we grew up with, Bluegrass music and gospel music and country music. We just do it in a (more organic) way.
Curtis Rempel: There was a moment when we felt like we had nothing to lose to go the route we did with this music. We didn’t need to change stuff just to change stuff — we were comfortable where we were — but we did it to see where it would go and that was back to our roots with a producer who was able to modernize those roots.
Brad: A lot of the vocals you hear on the Dear Life record, we didn’t even know they were going to be on the album when we did them. When sharing the demos with the label, they left that the way it was. There used to be a timeline and pressure and now we’re just doing things with pressure
Matt: And maybe the earlier teams were placing some of that pressure on you, steering you one way perhaps even a way you may didn’t wanna go…
Curtis: I remember back in the day listening to other records and thinking “I wanna sound like that” and this time we didn’t do that and it’s something that we didn’t ever do.
Brad: WE also were in a moment before we signed with Atlantic Records where we had no management or label and so we created an app and released our demos through there and our fans picked their favorite 10 and “Make You Mine” was their #1 song. So instead of releasing a song and hoping fans would like it, we found out what they loved and THEN released it to radio and it’s worked out well.
Matt: And now it’s charting quite well, how does it feel to be able to see the progress of the song week to week?
Brad: It’s really cool. I know the fans don’t really care about those charts but I know it’s an indicator of success and it’s something that’s getting good for us.
Matt: Another cool thing is that your song “Young Forever” is on Madden NFL 17 and I was thinking that A. it’s cool but B. the massive reach the song has on a platform like that and that the RIAA or Video Game industry should figure out some sort of award for that…
Brad: We got to be on Twitch TV and we were getting hammered by fans wondering why we were on the station playing the game and it ended at like 6-0 or something. It was fun to have them telling us how bad we were at the game.
Matt: I know how hard that game is this year versus past years so that’s OK.
Brad: That's good to know. Do you know where that song was featured the most because I bought the game and didn’t hear it?
Matt: It's featured more often -- when I've heard it -- in franchise league mode where you control a whole team rather than just a game or two.
Brad: Great!
How did you chose the two outside songs (“Soldier,” “The Only”) for the record?
Brad: Our buddy Dave Pacula said he had a song for us to listen to one day when he told us about “Soldier” -- and it was actually the day we met Kelsea Ballerini for the first time too -- at Black River Entertianment. "The Only" was written by our friends Ross Copperman and Jon Nite [and Nicolle Galyon] and while great as it was, we did ask them to change a couple lines in the song to make it fit High Valley more and they kindly did so. We’re always looking for stuff that sounds like we wrote it but it has to sound like something we did write and these fit that.
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