Jesse Valencia | GORKY

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The History of Jesse Valencia & Gorky in 40 Facts for Jesse’s 40th Birthday

Gorky Is (Probably) The Most Controversial Rock Band You’ve Never Heard Of

Every generation has one: a band too wild, too self-involved, and too chaotic for the mainstream to let in on purpose. For the past 25 years, buried deep in the mountains of rural Arizona, that band has been Gorky, who now have crawled out of the high desert and taken new roots in Portland. 

Formed in a high school geography class by Jesse Valencia and his blood brother-in-spirit Ben Holladay, Gorky were destined from day one to be more than just another “indie sleaze” band. Their story reads like a rock’n’roll fever dream: drug-fueled first shows, ex-Hell’s Angels producers, lineups exploding mid-performance, and beefs with Arizona rock royalty. One minute they were getting songwriting lessons from Michelle Branch and opening for bands like Eyes Set To Kill, the next they were nearly sued by Hanna-Barbera over a Flintstones-themed music video and becoming the cover story of The Arizona Republic. 

But Gorky is about more than chaos. They are political, prophetic, and deeply of their time. They livestreamed Occupy Wall Street, played Bernie Sanders rallies, and wrote anthems of small-town disillusionment and desert romanticism that helped define the “White Mountain Sound” — Arizona’s answer to Britpop and indie sleaze.

They’ve become a cult legend in the making, a band whose history stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the mythologies of bands much bigger than them, bands like The Velvet Underground, The Libertines, or the Meat Puppets. For 25 years, through tragedy and triumph, Gorky has built a discography that feels less like a career and more like a scrapbook of indie rock’s messy soul.

Now, for Jesse Valencia’s 40th birthday October 6th, his and Gorky’s story comes into focus: not as a footnote, but as one of the great untold epics of American rock’n’roll. 

Here is the history of Jesse Valencia & Gorky in 40 Facts for Jesse’s 40th birthday…
 

1. All-American Indigenous and Immigrant Heritage
   Descended from Yaqui refugees escaping the Porfiriato genocide of the 1900’s, German-Scandinavian Midwestern farmers and Appalachian Anglo-Saxons, Jesse Valencia was born October 6, 1985 in Phoenix, Arizona.
    
2. Indigenous Reclamation 
   Jesse’s family was enrolled in the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians in 2024. Valencia secured his family’s enrollment by proving their ancestry through historical evidence and records, applying his graduate level research skills, following decades of separation. 
    
3. Early Artistic Interests 
   Jesse has been into the arts since he was a young child. His first rejection letter was at age 8, after he submitted a four-page comics display to Marvel Comics to be a penciller on Spider-Man. They were amused and charmed at his submission, and said to submit again when he was 18. He was so crushed he never did, though he has remained an illustrator by both hobby and commission and publishing a comic remains one of his dreams. He is now both an illustrator, graphic designer, and painter.
     
4. A Noteworthy Musical Origin Story 
   Jesse first learned guitar from his dad at age 12 after seeing “Purple Rain”, and later learned his first songwriting lesson from fellow Northern Arizonan and Grammy winner Michelle Branch, whom he met at the Verde Valley Music Festival in the year 2000, before she was signed to Maverick Records. Jesse sent Michelle some of his lyrics. They were too long and complex, and she told him to write the music first, then add lyrics after (which was good advice). He is now a multi-instrumentalist, playing guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, harmonica, and vocals. 
    
5. The Birth of the Gork
   Jesse moved to Show Low, Arizona as a teenager, and met Ben Holladay in their high school geography class. Their band Gorky was born out of their shared love of music, comic books, movies, and pop culture almost immediately. The band’s earliest musical influences included Weezer, Oasis, The Strokes, and other bands popular in indie sleaze circles at the time.  
    
6. A Brotherhood Bound In Spirit
   While his father’s family was Catholic and Presbyterian and his mother’s family was Lutheran, Jesse was raised non-denominational Protestant but became interested in religion shortly after moving to Show Low, a predominantly Mormon town. Jesse later converted to Mormonism while still in high school, and was baptized by Ben into the faith, whose family helped welcome him into the Church. Ever since, they have considered one another family. Jesse and Ben both later left the LDS faith in their 20’s, disillusioned with its racist mythology and hyper-patriarchal worldviews.   
    
7. What’s In A Name? 
   The name of the band comes from Jesse’s childhood friend Whitney’s name for her comfort blanket, her ‘gorky’, which he learned about because she had written a short story about a fictional band named gorky, and after reading the story Jesse asked her if he could name his band that, since he could not think of anything else. She agreed, as long as he kept the ‘g’ lower case, as it is in the logo. Later, the band learned that the word ‘gorky’ meant ‘bitter’ in Russian, and was both the namesake of famous abstract expressionist painter Arshile Gorky, and a Soviet-era Russian author Maxim Gorky, whom Gorky Park is named for, and the heavy metal band named after the park. Jesse then began incorporating abstract expressionist art and Soviet communist aesthetics into Gorky’s brand. Also, a famous Belgian band, Gorki, began as ‘Gorky’ in the 90’s. As digital streaming began to rise, Jesse communicated with Gorki’s lead singer and songwriter, the late Luc de Vos, regarding their shared name. The band’s manager replied, “Don’t worry. No problem for us. We are GORKI from Belgium and you guys are GORKY from USA.”     
    
8. Acting Origins: Shakespeare and Broadway Musicals 
   Moving to Show Low too late for football tryouts, Ben invited Jesse to join him in the Drama Club. His starring roles in Taming Of The Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Guys And Dolls later earned him a full-ride scholarship to the local community college’s theater program, which he turned down to pursue music with Gorky full time.  
    
9. A Dominant Force In The Arizona Music Scene From The Start 
   The band had a string of early successes in the mid-2000’s, winning a local Battle of the Bands, earning heavy local radio airplay and opening for nationally touring Arizona bands like Lydia, Eyes Set To Kill and the Stiletto Formal, while befriending bands touring through Arizona that they liked, such as The Subways. 
    
10. Inventors of the White Mountain Sound 
    Gorky are among the originators of the “White Mountain Sound”, a unique, tough, anthemic blend of Southwestern indie rock, folk, country, and punk music that became Arizona’s biggest export of the 2010’s as Jimmy Eat World was in the 2000’s, Gin Blossoms were in the 90’s, and Meat Puppets were in the 80’s. By itself, the community of musicians which created the White Mountain Sound have produced not only Gorky but Zella Day, Charles Ellsworth, WRNTY, Phil The Band, Brandon Rodelo, Negative Thirty-Two, Chaparrelle, Phantom Spring, Phil The Band, Ryan David Orr, The Brighter Still, Alaska and Me, Boxen, and more. 
     
11. An Early Benefactor In Michael Fatali 
    World-famous landscape photographer Michael Fatali gifted Jesse and first bass player Christopher Christiansen with their first PA System in exchange for helping Christiansen’s father, a custom fabricator and artisan, install Fatali’s new gallery sign which he had built. 
     
12. Drugged-Out First Show
    The band’s first show was a fundraiser concert for the Show Low High School drama club. Nervous that they would suck, the band took then-legal over-the-counter ephedrine and played too fast. Their second was at the local LDS Stake Center where Jesse and Ben went to church. Their third was performing for then-Arizona Governor Jan Brewer at a gathering in Holbrook, Arizona.
     
13. The First Line-Up Change
    The band’s first bass player, Chris Christiansen, quit the band to join the Army, at which point Gregg Aldridge joined on bass. Gregg was 14 at the time and a freshman in high school, while Jesse and Ben were seniors. While Chris had brought a unique flavor to the original Gorky sound with his alt metal, math rock, and obscure tastes, Gregg brought a youthful, punk rock attitude and aesthetic that Jesse and Ben hadn’t yet encountered. During this transition period, Savannah Decker also joined the band on keyboards after initially trying out for guitar.  
     
14. The First Break-Up
    Chris rejoined on guitar after being medically discharged from the Army. The band started gaining momentum in Phoenix before he then quit again live during a show opening for post-hardcore band For The Record after confessing to the audience that he’d been secretly dating Ben’s ex-girlfriend, an aspiring fashion model and Playboy playmate. Christiansen was then evicted from the home the band all shared in Show Low, originally Ben’s home. Jesse and Ben put all of Chris’s belongings to the curb and hid the PA Jesse and Chris had earned from Fatali’s at Gregg’s, at which point Chris and the model girlfriend broke into the house, stole their CD collections, and vandalized the entire property. Years after the incident, all parties reconciled.
     
15. We Tried To Sound Like Anywhere But Where We Were And Ended Up Sounding Exactly Like Where We Were  
    At first, Gorky struggled to come up with an original sound, and resisted the pull of the dominant pop punk, emo, and screamo subcultures at the time, finding inspiration instead in 60’s psychedelic rock, 90’s Britpop, the garage rock revival happening in NYC, and the more indie-minded Midwest scene. Jesse’s songs became filled with characters and stories, mostly of an offbeat, nihilistic, or satirical nature, intended to paint an accurate picture of what it was like being stuck in a small conservative town in your teens and twenties when you felt you belonged elsewhere, chasing your dreams. 
     
16. Our First Engineers Were Ex-Hell’s Angels And UFO Abductee Adjacent 
    The band’s first recording session was in Snowflake, Arizona with a former Hell’s Angel-turned-devout Catholic who went by ‘T-Bone’ and looked like Viggo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters 2. The session went on longer than anticipated on account of T-Bone’s young children accompanying him. T-Bone threatened them when the band didn’t pay up, and withheld the master recording. They never saw him again. Their second recording session was with Rogelio Figueroa, a musician and inventor who is married to one of the daughters of famed UFO abductee Travis Walton, who lives in the White Mountains. Their third session was with Bob Geiger, recorded in their practice space, Gregg’s garage, becoming the lost album “The Tension of Nostalgic Minds”, only a few tracks of which still exist. 
     
17. First Move
    After moving to Phoenix with Ben’s brothers Vaughn and Keith while Gregg was finishing high school with a plan to push the band in Phoenix, Ben began dating one of Gregg’s cousins who lived in San Diego, and Jesse began dating the cousin’s best friend. After a heated summer of love, hearts were broken as Jesse and Ben realized that these long-distance relationships would be unsustainable, and they ended them. Unable to find jobs in the city, both Jesse and Ben ended up moving back to Show Low. 
     
18. Their Own Brand Of Marxism 
    Jesse joined the Communist Party in 2004 shortly after graduating high school and lied about his affiliation in order to join the US Army Reserves a couple of years later. As a teenager in the early 2000's Valencia was radicalized by his own readings of Karl Marx, Che Guevara, and other socialist and communist heroes.   
     
19. In The Army Now 
    Valencia joined the Army in 2006 as an MP, in the footsteps of his father who was a Police Chief and FBI Academy graduate, and his grandfather who was a parachute rigger in the 101st Airborne. Valencia served for nearly six years and was honorably discharged in 2011. He spent the entirety of his Army signing bonus on a hedonistic 21st birthday bash and new band equipment at the Tempe location of Guitar Center. The store let him sign their wall with the ‘Gorky’ logo alongside Linkin Park, Green Day, and others. 
     
20. A Felon And A Cop At The Same Time 
    Jesse Valencia is an ex-felon with a rap harder than most gangsta rap artists, all related to a DUI accident he was at fault in, in 2008, which left him with a fractured talus and delaying the release of Gorky’s album “High In The Low” by two years. He now has an ankle replacement. At the time of the accident, Jesse’s unit the 56th MP Co was being investigated by both the military and the media for torturing detainees during their deployment, and he was never disciplined for it. He later was honorably discharged for medical reasons in May of 2011, halfway through his probation. 
     
21. Highly Educated, Or Just High?  
    To pay off his $45,000 restitution and probation fees, Jesse went back to college on the GI Bill and took out federal student loans to pay the court. Though his theater scholarship had long since passed him up, the Dean of the Performing Arts Department at the local community college who originally awarded it to him allowed him to complete his mandated 360 hours community service by building sets and acting in the ensemble for that year’s fall play, the musical “Aida.” This marked Jesse’s first return to the theatrical stage since high school as well as his last theatrical performance, at which point he transitioned to film. After building up a habit of robbing Peter to pay Paul, Jesse became a professional student and now has Three Master’s Degrees: an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in Literature from Northern Arizona University, and an MFA in Screenwriting from the David Lynch Graduate School of Cinematic Arts at MIU. He attended college off and on from 2006 until 2020 and was NAU’s first MFA in Creative Writing graduate to publish his first book of Creative Nonfiction, Keep Music Evil: The Brian Jonestown Massacre Story.  
     
22. Rock And Roll Escapist 
    The year after the accident, Jesse started working on his book about the infamous psychedelic rock band the Brian Jonestown Massacre, which led him to pursue his first graduate degree, the MFA in Creative Writing at Northern Arizona University. Ten years later, “Keep Music Evil” was published by Jawbone Press, a narrative history of the band framed as a memoir of Jesse’s, influencing both Joel Gion’s memoir “In The Jingle Jangle Jungle” and Ondi Timoner’s 2024 documentary “DIG!XX” 
     
23. Transition Period
    Jesse lived with Benjamin Turner (WRNTY, Alaska and Me) for a time in Flagstaff while he was in college, and the two ended up writing some songs together that later became Gorky classics, including “Sing A Song” and “More Electric Music.” Turner sparked Jesse’s interest in indie folk music, and this was the height of the indie “boom, clap” era. After Gregg married a fan of the band, he left the group before their landmark 2014 show in Flagstaff opening for Joel Gion and The Primary Colours, at which point Houston Ellsworth and Tevin Crabdree joined, changing the sound and direction of the band once again as Jesse was getting out of the army and off of probation. 
     
24. Anti-Corporate Origin Story  
    He won an EEOC settlement against a local franchise pizza chain after they fired him for needing surgery on his ankle. He read the ADA and made his own case. Most of the award money went to his probation fees.
     
25. Aspiring Screen Actors and Collaboration with Travis Mills  
    In the 2010’s, Jesse began a creative collaboration with writer-director Travis Mills for Gorky’s music videos for “Datass” and “Super Drunk.” Jesse’s first onscreen acting role was opposite Tom Sizemore in Mills’ independent crime drama “Durant’s Never Closes”; Valencia first saw Sizemore in Saving Private Ryan, which was the first R-Rated movie his dad allowed him to watch in the theater. Jesse composed score for Travis Mills’ films “Durant’s Never Closes” and later “Bride of Violence”, the latter of which he and Ben both had roles in, marking Ben’s first and only onscreen role.  
     
26. Flintstones Controversy With Hanna-Barbera
    The Travis Mills-directed music video for “Super Drunk” was shot on location at a Flintstones-themed children’s playground near the Grand Canyon. After seeing pre-production photos of the video shoot, Hanna-Barbera threatened to sue Gorky and Mills for their dark satire of American culture, forcing them to open the video with a disclaimer.  
     
27. Political Beginnings And Early Activism  
    Jesse was removed as the first Vice President of Northland Pioneer College’s Student Government Association after publishing an article in the student government newsletter endorsing Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton and inviting Noam Chomsky to speak at the college. In 2011, Jesse live-streamed Phoenix’s heavily-publicized Occupy Wall Street protest before escaping arrest, and performed at a Bernie Sanders fundraiser in early 2016. The “Dump On Trump!” remix of “Super Drunk” was retweeted by CNN around the time Gorky headlined the Flagstaff Bernie Sanders rally. That same day, Gorky fan Skye Perez, the kid sister of their roadie and touring manager Chris Perez, and their father were killed in an accident on the highway. Skye’s boyfriend at the time, Jonathan Apodaca, later became the drummer for Negative Thirty-Two, another local band from the White Mountains.  
     
28. Beef With The Gin Blossoms 
    Jesse and the band were forced to abandon sessions for Gorky’s fifth album when the Gin Blossoms sold Uranus Studios, where the band was recording, to Four Peaks Brewery without notifying them. Beef still exists to this day, with Jesse describing Gin Blossoms’ music as “Boomer pop grunge shite.” 
     
29. Movie Theater Exhibitor Worker 
    Jesse has worked for WME Theatres since 2012. After being a manager for several years, he built their social media from the ground up, helped lead the company through the pandemic, and has been recognized in the broader movie theater industry for his work, including speaking on panels at national conferences. He also helped organize the Show Low Film Festival, now entering its ninth year.   
     
30. The Dharma, David Lynch, and Transcendental Meditation
    Beating out three other applicants for his spot, Jesse was accepted into the David Lynch film school in 2018 on the same day he was offered a contract for the Brian Jonestown Massacre book. The David Lynch Foundation covered the cost of his Transcendental Meditation training, which he credits with saving his life. Jesse graduated the David Lynch film school in 2020 and is now a public advocate for T.M.  
     
31. Accidental Lobbyist 
    He made Arizona history when his Sitgreaves County publicity stunt nearly created Arizona’s 16th county, a stunt intended to promote his David Lynch thesis. During the Sitgreaves stunt, he exposed the white supremacy in the Arizona GOP against Rep. Walter Blackman, the first black Republican ever elected to the AZ legislature, brought the helium industry to Arizona and wrote the part of the Arizona film tax credit bill that guaranteed in-state hiring to grow the film industry in AZ.
     
32. Beef With Ariel Pink 
    In 2020, during the Jan 6 Capitol Hill riots, Ariel Pink was caught attending the riots to avoid sexual assault charges in Los Angeles. Jesse, who had never liked Ariel or his music, was furious that this got more press than his Sitgreaves County stunt, and attacked Ariel online. Ariel hit back, comparing Jesse’s crudeness to that of Anton Newcombe, whom Jesse wrote “Keep Music Evil” about.  
     
33. From Fan To Collaborator To Disappointment 
    After graduating the David Lynch film school, Jesse worked on a sequel to “Purple Rain” with Jerome Benton, who later removed Jesse from the project after advocating for his creative rights. Al Magnoli, director of “Purple Rain” whom Jesse met through Jerome, was initially going to direct Valencia’s David Lynch thesis following the Sitgreaves stunt, but ultimately decided to write his own project based on Valencia’s script titled “Rock Heart.” The combined letdown of these experiences ultimately led to Jesse shelving his now-finished second book project, Dreams: The Films of Prince.
     
34. The Death of Ben Holladay
    After contracting Covid-19, Ben discovered that he had Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency, a rare genetic lung disease. After the death of his fiancee Rachel Weddle, Ben moved in with Jesse for the last six months of his life, and passed away a week before what would have been his 38th birthday. 
     
35. Fighting Live Nation In Portland 
    Jesse joined MusicPortland in 2024 and exposed Live Nation’s manipulation of land sale processes in Portland during the music community’s much-publicized fight with them there. After the hearings, he then helped elect Portland’s first-ever pro-music City Council and Mayor in the 2024 election. Valencia's advocacy methods, while unorthodox and controversial, nevertheless have helped expose much of what needs reformed in the city. 
     
36. Independent Filmmaker
    Jesse is an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, producing and directing several Gorky music videos, and contributing art and music composition to several other projects.  
     
37. Lesser-Known Talents 
    He is a published poet. His first published piece was in a Veterans’ anthology published by Iraq Veterans Against the War. He is also a gifted illustrator with an impressive portfolio of comics, gig posters, album art, and more. 
     
38. Anti-War Veteran 
    He’s been a committed anti-Zionist since joining the Army in 2006, realizing how unhealthy the United States’ relationship was with Israel; in 2007, he had surgery on a shoulder injury and avoided deployment to Tikrit. His unit, the 56th Military Police Company, was subsequently investigated for torture during their deployment. On October 5th, 2025, the last day of his thirties, Valencia spoke alongside Councilor Mitch Green and other veterans against Trump's deployment of National Guard troops to Portland. Valencia continues to be active in veterans organizations and anti-war demonstrations.  
     
39. Other Musical Ventures 
    Valencia is an exceptionally gifted hip-hop/R&B artist and producer and working studio musician, and has worked on several projects with fellow indigenous artist Brandon Rodelo, contributing beats, vocals, bass and guitar.
     
40. An Impressive Self-Released Discography 
    Gorky’s discography is like a living scrapbook of the indie sleaze era, beginning with 2010’s “High In The Low”, 2011’s “The Deuces” 2013’s “More Electric Music”, 2016’s “Gorky”, 2019’s “Mathemagician”, 2021’s “Sitgreaves County” and 2022’s “The First Band On Mars”, spanning genres as diverse as indie folk, psych rock, old school rock and roll, space rock, punk, country and more. Their most well-known songs include “Action Pants”, “She Spoke”, “Datass” and “Super Drunk.” All of their music is self-released and the band has self-managed and self-booked since 2001.  

What more proof do you need that the Gork is a living relic of the Indie Sleaze era?! 

Way back in the MySpace days, there used to be a function where you could look up bands by genre, and you had to list your genre as well so that people could find you and check out your music. 

In those days, I was really interested in the idea of making Gorky a band that could play all genres, which is something I think we've achieved. There's Gorky rockabilly, vaporwave, country, metal, R&B, even hip-hop, bluegrass and psychedelia.

Anyways, while digging through the vaults, I came across these lists I'd written down by hand, where I had gone through every single genre of music MySpace had listed, to see which genres we'd incorporated, and which ones we hadn't yet. 

Wouldn't you know it…in doing this little exercise, I've created a historical artifact! 

So below are the musical genres we had incorporated and not, as musical genres were understood during the era of Myspace. 

What do you notice? How have our understanding of genres changed since then?  

✅ INCORPORATED (or familiar to):

Acoustic (1940s, USA)

Alternative (Early 1980s USA & England)

Americana (1940s, USA)

Blues (Late 19th Century, Southern USA)

Classic Rock (x)

Country (1920s, USA)

Emo (Mid-1980s Washington D.C., USA)

Experimental (1960s USA & England)

Folk (1950s–mid 1960s, USA)

Folk rock (1960s, USA, Canada, England)

Gothic (Late 1970s, England)

Grunge (mid-1980s, Washington, USA)

Indie (Early 1980s, USA and United Kingdom)

Garage (Late 1950s USA/early 1960s Canada)

Glam (Early 1970s, England)

Jazz (Early 1910s New Orleans, USA)

Minimalist (1960s USA)

New Wave (Late 1970s, USA and England)

Pop (1950s, England and USA)

Pop Punk (mid-1970s USA/England/Canada/others)

Post punk (Late 1970s, USA & England)

Powerpop (1960s USA & England)

Progressive (mid-late 1960s USA, UK, Italy, Germany)

Psychedelic (mid 1960s, USA and England)

Psychobilly (Late 1970s, England)

Punk (mid-1970s USA, England & Australia)

Reggae (Late 1960s, Jamaica)

Rock (1960s USA/England)

Rockabilly (Early-mid 1950s, USA)

Ska (Late 1950s, Jamaica)

Surf (mid 1950s, USA)

Shoegaze (Mid-late 1980s, England)

❌ NOT INCORPORATED:

2-Step

A cappella

Acousmatic/Tape music

Afrobeat

Ambient

Big Beat

Black Metal

Bossa Nova

Breakbeat

Breakcore

Celtic

Chinese pop

Chinese traditional

Classical

Classical–opera vocal

Club

Crunk

Death Metal

Disco House

Downtempo

Drum & Bass

Dub

Dutch pop

Electro

Electroacoustic

Electronica

Emotronic

Flamenco

Freestyle

French pop

Funk

Fusion

German pop

Ghetto tech

Gospel

Grime

Grindcore

Happy Hardcore

Hard House

Hardcore

Hawaiian

Healing & Easy Listening

HipHop

House

Hyphy

IDM

Idol

Industrial

Italian pop

Jam band

Japanese classical music

J-Pop

Jungle

K-Pop

Latin

Live Electronics

Lounge

Lyrical

Melodramatic Popular Song

Metal

Neo-soul

Nu-jazz

Pop

Progressive House

R&B

Rap

Reggaeton

Regional Mexican

Roots Music

Salsa

Samba

Screamo

Showtunes

Soul

Southern rock

Spanish pop

Swing

Tango

Techno

Thrash

Trance

Trip hop

Tropical

Turntablism

Western Swing

Zouk

 

WATCH MY VIDEO ON TIKTOK

I want to offer my heartfelt congratulations to Meara McLaughlin on her outstanding leadership of MusicPortland and on the City’s declaration of July 10th as Meara McLaughlin Day. It’s a richly deserved honor. Her tireless advocacy has left a lasting legacy on Portland’s music scene, and I’m truly ecstatic to see her recognized for it.

That said, I also want to take a moment to publicly apologize. My recent posts and aggressive tactics in calling out Live Nation and its developer allies—though rooted in documented truths—have cast unintended shadows over friends and allies like Meara McLaughlin, Councilor Dunphy, and the Music Policy Council. I fully understand and accept their condemnation of my actions, and I take complete responsibility for how my anger and satire caused stress and unintended harm to people who never deserved it.

I’m not here to make excuses. But I do want to offer context.

I’m a working-class Indigenous person. My Yaqui family fled genocide in Sonora. So when I saw wealthy developers in Portland—many of them already in positions of power—using language about racial equity to sell themselves public land on behalf of a corporate monopoly, it hit me on a deep ancestral level. Land theft is not an abstract concept to me. I’ve lived it.

To me, this wasn't just shady politics. It was a modern echo of what Porfirio Díaz did to the Yaqui: use public institutions and racial politics to displace marginalized people in the service of corporate interests.

When I learned that this group had quietly been spreading a false narrative to discredit Councilor Dunphy and others who challenged them, I lost it. In a heated moment, I posted a satirical cartoon of two of these individuals—Andrew Colas and Stephen Green—wearing dunce hats, accompanied by a pointed message calling out what I saw as their role in upholding systemic racism under the guise of progress.

It was aggressive. It was crude. And it was meant to be.
But it wasn’t meant to drag others into the fire with me.

When I saw that people I cared about were taking heat for it—people who had nothing to do with it—I took the post down. Not because I regretted standing up to powerful people, but because I had failed to consider how my words would reflect on those around me.

If you’ve seen my work—my music videos, my book, my film, my political art—you know that satire, irony, and offense are part of the toolkit I’ve used for years. But I now see that my usual approach doesn’t always translate when others are caught in the crossfire. And for that, I truly am sorry.

I’ve helped elect good people to office in this city. I’ve done that as myself and on behalf of Gorky—not for any one candidate or organization. But I recognize now that my fire, while effective in exposing corruption, can burn the wrong people too.

So here’s where I stand.

I’m laying down my rhetorical arms. I’m not going to keep targeting individuals in the Portland Metro Chamber, Prosper Portland, or elsewhere. I’ll let the press and public do their jobs holding people accountable.

And I’m going to refocus on the thing that drives me most: my art.

I’m a musician. A writer. A filmmaker. I’m not a politician or policymaker. I’ve done what I can for this city, and I’m proud of that. But now it’s time to finish my film—and to center my energy where it can do the most good.

To everyone who has stood by me: thank you.
To everyone who was hurt or burdened by my actions: I’m sorry.

And to the people still profiting off injustice: the cameras are rolling.

-JMGV

Bonus: Read about how the Brian Jonestown Massacre nearly broke up Oasis in my book “Keep Music Evil: The Brian Jonestown Massacre Story”

The best thing about the 4th of July was the reunion of the UK’s greatest band. 

Man, it brings back some memories.

Foremost among them is I think it's obvious that Oasis’s influence is all over Gorky, for better or worse. 

When I joined the Army, I had three CDs which I listened to on repeat: Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, Abbey Road by The Beatles, and Be Here Now by Oasis. 

I knew very few people at that time who liked the Arctics or Oasis, much less Britpop, but Britpop was everything to me. Not because of an Anglophile thing, though that was certainly part of it, but because it was already a part of my mental fiber growing up. 

Back in the 90’s there was this thing called Cool Britannia, and America ate it up. Princess Diana. Spice Girls. Goldeneye 007 on the N64. Austin Powers. And yes, Oasis. I remember seeing Champagne Supernova on MTV and blowing my 10 year old mind out. 

My deeper gateway into Oasis, Blur, and the rest of Britpop musically didn’t happen until the later 90s, when The Verve exploded with “Bittersweet Symphony.” I went that direction as a young teen because I couldn’t get into what was big in the US. Sure, we listened to Green Day and Red Hot Chili Peppers and the like, but American rock was just plain goofy compared to Britain, because Britain was cool, and we wanted to be cool. Thank God The Strokes came out when we were sophomores. Otherwise, American rock would have ended up all sounding like Creed or something. And we hated all that stuff. 

Playing music like Oasis in a small Southwestern mountain town was a hard sell, and we struggled at first to get shows. Jimmy Eat World was who was popular then, and we couldn’t quite get that crowd. But Ben and I definitely saw ourselves as a kind of Gallagher brothers. The American heirs to Oasis and the American answer to the Arctic Monkeys in one. But most of Arizona didn’t care about the Arctic Monkeys musically in 2005. 

2005’s Don’t Believe The Truth is my favorite record of theirs and 100 percent influenced the Gorky sound. So heavy was Oasis in the Gorky orbit that I remember when Oasis broke up, thankfully after I’d seen them, I felt a strong calling to level up my songwriting, to fill the void they’d left. By that time, I was heavy into writing the Brian Jonestown Massacre book, and learning about the recording process.

I think I might have simply stayed in that spot, artistically, because by the time all our biggest songs came out and really started working for us, it was the latter half of the 2010’s, and it’d already been a decade since that kind of rock and roll had been popular. “Action Pants” and “Super Drunk” would have had a lot different impact in 2005 than 2015, when the dawn of Trumpism had all but ruined comedy, parody, and satire itself.

As for the rest of the Gorky catalog, “Be In The Now” and “You’ve Got To Learn To Be Lonely” sound like Oasis songs. There’s Oasis in “Roll With Me,” “Boogie Machine”, “Brave New Animal”—I hear it all over the place. I can hear me and Ben filling that void for ourselves in a lot of these songs. There’s more than Oasis going on. There’s some Strokes, some Libertines, some Weezer, but definitely a lot of Oasis.

Yet now, with Oasis back, suddenly it’s like a standard has returned for guitar music, even though it’s been that long. Especially in the age of AI, someone actually playing the guitar has to mean something. 

It seems like now, people need to support local bands and artists more than ever. The point of music isn’t just the sound itself, but the experience required to make that sound, and that song. 

Oasis appealed to us because they were working class like us, because their songs are the bollocks, and because they are hilarious. 

Welcome back, lads! 

-JMGV

Listen to the White Mountain Sound playlist on Spotify. 

So what is “the White Mountain Sound”? 

It's an undeniably authentically Southwestern sound, rooted in these Colorado Plateau small towns, where country twang, garage rock aesthetics, and songwriting techniques imported from faraway places like the Midwest, NYC and the UK swirled into the minds of a group of millennial high-desert dwelling teens in early 21st century Arizona. Those kids started bands and made their own version of indie rock. 

Historically, just because I'm almost 40 now, it started with our band, Gorky, who emerged as the lone surviving band among a group of bands from our high school era of friends, and shortly behind us came Alaska and Me, which I guess if any band could have been called our ‘rival’ band it would have been them. They looked great, their songs were great, and their recordings were great. I remember at the time they were like a more rocking version of Lydia, for folks who remember that band. 

Side note: We played with Lydia back in 2004, when they were touring one of their earlier records! Good times. 

Anyways, they were and were not our ‘rivals’ because really they were the only other band in town, and they were doing awesome things, and we were all technically friends, because they knew Gregg who played bass with us in those days, and they were the same age, so we all were hanging out. We played two completely different styles of rock music, so there wasn't a real rivalry. They had their audience and we had ours, but there was some healthy competition, I think, at least on our side, because we had never had another band to go up against like that before, and we played a couple shows together but most of the shows were with other bands as we both did our own thing, climbing different ladders. 

Zella Day at one point got into their orbit, because I believe she dated the singer Tyler Cox at one time, but I can't remember for sure. I remember I was over at Tyler's once and she was there, and there was a bit of recording going on, whether it was us or them, I can't remember that either. Ha! But anyways that was the only time I remember meeting Zella, and not long after that she went to Los Angeles and started her path there, which for her turned out to be a smart move. 

After Alaska and Me split up, Charles Ellsworth left the White Mountains for Salt Lake City and started pursuing his own folk-Americana vibe before he headed out to NYC and the East Coast. The rest of Alaska and Me reformed as Boxen briefly, with a new bass player, Tevin, who would end up being the bass player in Gorky for many years after Gregg left, and from there the other members of Alaska and Me ended up forming their own projects. 

Around that time, we really started to take off with our singles and music videos for “Datass” and “Super Drunk”, which was then followed by a fledgling acting career where I got to star opposite Tom Sizemore in Durant's Never Closes and then published my book about the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Keep Music Evil--so in a way that first wave of the White Mountain Sound, of all of us who were friends and played and recorded together, really sprang out and imported our thing to different places. Zella to Los Angeles, Charles to Salt Lake and NYC, and now Gorky to Portland, but before we came to Portland we made Arizona history with the Sitgreaves County stunt. 

The main group in the next wave after Gorky, Alaska and Me, and Zella Day is undoubtably Negative 32, who really captured teenage angst with their pop punk sound in ways I think that the first wave of us didn't because we were all too focused on trying to sound like cool adults. Negative 32 has some really good songs.  

Sadly, for Negative 32, they did not have a band that was more their age that could compete with them the way we had when we were at their level, but I think that led them to really perfect an original pop punk sound for themselves as well, and I think there is a clear evolution in the songwriting that continues today in their new project, Phantom Spring, which is now based in the Phoenix metro area I believe. 

Phil The Band and WRNTY have evolved out of Alaska and Me and Boxen, and I have released a couple of solo Jesse Valencia records as well, though Gorky will return one day. Zella Day has an awesome new indie-retro country group, Chapparelle, that hearkens back to her White Mountain and garage rock roots. 

I've also collaborated on some hip-hop tracks with my good friend Brandon Rodelo, a fellow indigenous artist from my cousin tribe Mayo (Yoreme), who has established himself as a leader in the Phoenix hip-hop scene with his song “Arismokazona” featuring the one and only Afroman.

I would say this is really the core of this sound and this playlist, these bands, and how we have interacted with each other and against each other over the years, but to prove that the White Mountains has its own sound I've included tracks from Ryan David Orr's White Mountain-based bands The Brighter Still and The Secret Trails, and Ashley Westcott's own original country tunes. These artists were adjacent to us, and the vibes of the mountain can be heard audibly to benefit us all.  

There are strikingly similar themes in our lyrics, in some ways a similar twang, and even in the ways we rock out. I could easily hear all of us playing a show together, even though we're all of different genres. 

Also because this has happened in the past, and they are memories to be grateful for. 

In the future, I am going to review these records my friends have put out, and really dig into them. Get into what makes them tick, and really celebrate this sound that we created together. 

-Jesse  

THE PROPHETIC POLITICS OF GORKY IN FIVE SONGS.

People have always asked me about the name of our band, and wondered if there were political connotations. 

There weren't at first, but I leaned into it after a while. 

The name of our band comes from my childhood best friend Whitney's name for her comfort blanket, which she called her ‘gorky.’ 

Neither of us had any fucking clue that ‘Gorky’ was the name of a park in the then freshly-unSoviet Russia, or that it was the name of a Communist Russian author, but once I found out about that stuff, it led me to read Marx and all the great socialists of the olden time, like Che Guevara, who is one of my personal heroes, when I was 16 and 17 years old.  

And from there I became something of a Marxist. I even joined the CPUSA, a fact I had to conceal when I joined the Army later, in 2006. 

I still would consider myself something of a Marxist, but more philosophically than in a DSA sense. Anyhoos--

Gorky's songs are often about nostalgia, or heartache, or sometimes even about funny, novelty things, but I think most people would not think of us as a political band. Certainly, we're not Rage Against The Machine, but we're not the least political band either. 

So I thought--are we a political band? I usually steer away from taking a strict political view because Gorky is a big tent that is welcoming to everyone, and everyone should feel welcome with us, but that being said there are some political positions I have taken in my songs that do amount to what could be described as a left-wing position. 

This is interesting to me, because I don't quite fit the leftist/progressive/liberal mold socially or artistically. I mean, look at our songs and our approach to parody and satire. We have been called everything under the sun: sexist, racist, patriarchal, misogynistic, offensive, crude, crass, and so on and so on. 

I would say that's because Gorky was born out of a moment in pop culture where the works of Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Dave Chappelle, and Tenacious D reigned supreme in our teenage minds, and we sort of just stayed there. When we finally started seeing some success in the 2010's, that culture was beginning to be repressed in the youth, and replaced with the unfortunate “woke” culture we see now, so of course songs like “#Datass” and “Super Drunk” were frowned upon, even if they were popular. 

This has become difficult to navigate, especially as the stuffy performative social conservatism of my youth has been absorbed into the left more than into the right. 

We're in a weird time.

I do know that I am going to stay on the same path I started on a ½ of a century ago, when the band began, because if anything in another 25 years people will look back and Gorky will maybe have accurately diagnosed the first half of the century. Who knows. 

I just let the music speak for itself…   

FOLLOW GORKY ON SPOTIFY 

“DUMP ON TRUMP” 

“Hey, Donald Trump in office is scary, so if you feel the Bern go vote for Sanders in the primary--” 

What is the most bizarre thing about this song is that it was a remix of our 2015 song ‘Super Drunk’ and is just as old as Donald Trump's political career, yet not one word is irrelevant or needs changed. The song is just as relevant today, over a decade later, as it was when we first released it. The cover art features Trump shitting into his own mouth a la ‘tub girl’ for those who know some history of the internet. Anyways, the artist Alex Voss said we could use the art as long as we donated to Bernie, and we did and actually ended up playing Bernie's rally in Flagstaff, Arizona that year, and the song was retweeted by a CNN News Anchor which was cool. 

“AMERICAN IMMIGRANT” 

“Keep your head low when you're runnin' from the Border Patrol--” 

This song, to the tune of ‘Froggy Went-A Courtin’", tells of my ancestry on my father's mother's side, so the non-Yaqui side of my dad, but after going through this and that ancestor on down the line, I bring it back to current events: the same people who are going after migrants now, like ICE, are the same feds who went after my bootlegging ancestors, my ancestors who were conscripted in mines for labor, and so on and so forth. There's no difference, it's just an authority figure trying to stop people from moving around because it threatens the power structures in place.   

“BRAVE NEW ANIMAL” 

“With this new ruler, everyone is to blame--” 

With the advent of AI, this pre-AI track from 2019's Mathemagician hits different. The song is really about the over-digitization of society and its effects on mental health, and the song ultimately blames the people for this outcome. If people weren't such flawed moral beings, things like this would never happen, but here we are, in a barely functioning dystopia with an authoritarian leader, and everything that was awful about the future in the movies I grew up watching are now coming true. It's bonkers. 

“WHAT HAPPENED?”

“I'll free Palestine, Tibet and Bangladesh--” 

I was saying ‘Free Palestine’ back in 2008 and 2009 when this little rocker came out on The Deuces, while I was still enlisted as an MP in the US Army. I knew back then that these imperialist wars were being fought on Israel's behalf. I have always been against Israeli apartheid and for the liberation of the Palestinian people. As an indigenous person whose family and people were genocided by imperialist powers, I have nothing but sympathy for the people of Palestine and nothing but loathsome disdain for Zionists, which has probably hurt my job prospects over the years. 
 

“LET'S WAR” 
“If disinformation got you killing somebody, I think y'all need a shrink--” 

Technically this song is on one of my solo records, but it was supposed to be a Gorky record. Anyways, it's all the Gork. But the song is really like a sequel to 'Brave New Animal' in the sense that feeding into these algorithms like we have been doing, these little boxed worlds, has created this awful sentiment between people that ultimately has led to violence. People are getting assassinated and no one cares. School shooting after school shooting, and so on. The way out of this is to get out of our heads and into community. 

After months of development, I am ready to announce my new film project, “AMERICAN DREAMS”! 

This project has been several years in the making…

It began as my thesis at the David Lynch film school while I was attending there, 2018-2020, and was once called “IN THE LAND OF GOOD OAKS,” as readers of my book “KEEP MUSIC EVIL: THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE STORY” will remember.

“Good Oaks” was not without success, as the controversial Sitgreaves County publicity stunt which propelled Gorky to the cover of the Arizona Republic two weekends in a row (and helped flip Arizona blue in 2020) began to attract attention from important industry players.    

The script then went through a period of development with some of the creative team behind Purple Rain before I had to split from those guys for their sheer disrespect and unprofessionalism on tangential projects. They say never meet your heroes. I say don’t trust them either.

Then, in January of 2023, my creative partner and Gorky co-founder Ben Holladay died of Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Disease, a rare genetic lung disorder, a week after our dream producer agreed to produce the soundtrack. 

“In The Land Of Good Oaks” died with Ben. I tried to get another version of the film going, but it just wasn't working out. 

I moved to Portland, Oregon, to be closer to my family and network. In December of 2023, my friend Zia McCabe of the Dandy Warhols invited me to a music policy forum where I met then-city council candidate Jamie Dunphy and joined the incredible organization MusicPortland.

They were fighting Live Nation at the time, and I'd never experienced a music community quite on this scale before. I would be lying if I didn't say my initial reason for joining the fight was to try and pull off another “Sitgreaves,” but as I learned how wonderful and good-hearted Portland's music community was, I laid aside my aspirations and learned to serve without an incentive. This time, I fought for what I felt was the right thing to do. 

We fought valiantly, but then the land was stolen. We didn't ‘lose’. 

We were bullied into it, and because of the rules of performative political correctness, some were forced to apologize for things they didn't do. 

I refuse to acknowledge a ‘loss’ in that fight. To do so is to admit that the opposition defeated us soundly, and I believe they--the Portland Metro Chamber and Prosper Portland, who conspired with Live Nation on the steal--are among the worst civic organizations in the United States. 

While falsified accusations of racism led to the land theft in Portland, that isn't where everyone should be focusing. The racism is a smokescreen, a fluke, a distraction to keep Portlanders' eyes averted from the grifting by the city's corporate elite.  

Racism is just one part of a larger toolkit that Live Nation, really and truly one of the worst organizations in the world, uses to justify its land grabs. 

Avoiding the truth, that the developers manipulated racism, empowered Live Nation to completely dominate the proceedings, and we were bulldozed. 

These good people at MusicPortland and the Music Policy Council who I consider friends were the targets of a coordinated attack, and I watched helplessly as they wrestled with the consequences of these falsified accusations. It was like one after another, they felt some manner of guilt or responsibility about it. To me, it was plain as day what was going on around me, and it made me sick to think that a group of people could do this and get away with it so easily.      

So I worked as a canvasser for Jamie Dunphy's campaign, knocking on doors and talking to folks throughout Portland about how they'd like to see the city change. At the same time, I lobbied with MusicPortland to engage every candidate we could on music policy and fighting Live Nation.

During this period, Gorky became a policy think tank and lobbying org instead of a band.  

In the end, co-organizing with MusicPortland and knocking on doors for Jamie not only got Jamie elected, but it got an entire pro-music city council elected for the first time in the city's history. Our efforts were so successful, that the city's political class were embarrassed to admit that we'd outshined them.

Notably, the Gorky PDX Music Voter Guide was the most accurate voter guide released last year, in terms of endorsed candidates-to-election ratio. 

However, unlike my experience in the Arizona Legislature, none of what I did for the City of Portland during this time was bullshit. This experience, which has been an adventure, taught me that community can heal grief, and now that we have a pro-music city council, and the Live Nation fight here is all but over, it is time I take what I have learned, what I've experienced, and do what I actually do.

I am not a policymaker. I am not a politician. I am an artist. And yes, sometimes I use shock. Because it works. 

When David died earlier this year, I remembered everything he taught me about being true to my ideas and I realized that the truest idea I have now was to show the people of Portland, the country, and the world the truth of my experience through my art. 

It was time to return to the film Ben and I were going to make together, and give it a new birth. A new life. 

As David Lynch taught and believed, a disruption of consciousness is sometimes necessary for evolution. 

More soon! 

The information in this blog post is being absorbed into the PDX LIVE NATION SAGA

PURCHASE “HIGH IN THE LOW” ON BANDCAMP

High In The Low: The Story of Our First Record

Rock and roll mythology isn’t just about the records—it’s about the stories behind them. The chaos, the triumphs, the disasters, the choices that shape an album long before the world ever hears it. 

High In The Low is one of those records. 

It’s the album that starts with me joining the Army Reserve and ends with me wrecking my car in a DUI. The accident left me with brain damage and a shattered talus, and the sessions for the album were abandoned. 

We wouldn’t self-release the record until 2010, by which point we were already deep into recording its follow-up, The Deuces.

Back in 2006, I was stuck in Show Low, Arizona. No money, no clear way out, and a band that felt too small for the dreams we had. The only way forward? The Army Reserve. 

I signed up, took the signing bonus, and instead of using it to build savings or plan for the future, I did the only thing that made sense to me—I dropped a small fortune at Guitar Center. It was the kind of spending spree that, in hindsight, felt legendary. 

We spent so much money that the store let us draw the Gorky logo on their wall, as if we were some famous band. We weren’t. But in that moment, it felt like we could be.

What did I buy? The biggest speaker I could find. The biggest guitar I could find. At the time, I had no understanding of pedals, tube amps, or the nuances of sound design. I just knew we needed to sound big. 

Gorky had always been a scrappy little garage band, but I wanted more—more volume, more power, more presence. 

So there we were, playing tiny clubs, lugging around a 4x12 speaker cabinet, absolutely overwhelming the space. It looked ridiculous. But it was a defining moment. That gear lasted for years—two decades later, the drum set and guitar are still in use. That impulsive spending shaped the sound of High In The Low in a way nothing else could have.

The album itself documents that transition—from small-town punks playing dive bars to something bigger, louder, and more unhinged.

A lot of these songs we wrote in high school or shortly after, and our gear just couldn't cut it. We couldn't make it sound like we knew it was supposed to sound, and what it came down to was our equipment. I mean, Ben's drumset was stitched together by leftover pieces from kits that the various school departments had trashed and replaced already, thanks to the kindness of our public school music teachers. 

Impressions of High In The Low

High In The Low feels like a time capsule—a document of a band in transition, searching for identity while absorbing the sounds and culture surrounding us. It captures the energy of youth, the angst of uncertainty, and the thrill of discovery. It was written and recorded in an isolated world, in a town far removed from major music hubs, yet it reaches for something larger, reaching back to rock and roll’s roots while simultaneously looking forward.

The Sound: A Collision of Garage, Punk, and Classic Rock

Musically, the album grabs from everywhere—there’s garage rock grit, punk urgency, classic rock swagger, and an early attempt at psych-leaning textures (even though we hadn’t yet discovered reverb). The big, overpowering 4x12 speaker cabinet setup resulted in a raw, loud, unfiltered sound, which adds to the charm of the record. We were pushing our technical limits while maintaining a visceral, in-the-moment quality.

The dual influence of Chuck Berry and The Beatles is especially strong, which makes sense given our attempt to go back to the foundations of rock music rather than emulate contemporary scenes. 

Songs like "Kick It!" and "Motorcycle" embody that primal rock and roll energy, while "Waiting For Your Love" is a clear nod to McCartney-style melody and arrangement.

The emo-punk undertones show up in "And It Goes On", revealing our attempt to engage with modern sounds but still retaining our own raw songwriting style.

The Lyrics: A Blend of Personal, Literary, and Countercultural Themes

Lyrically, High In The Low is full of longing, frustration, and reflection on youthful experiences. 

Many of the songs are about relationships and missed opportunities, likely reflecting our age at the time—just a couple years removed from high school, still processing those emotions. 

"No More Time", for example, carries the pain of hesitation, while "Kick It!" is about the innocence of just hanging out rather than hooking up.

There’s also a spiritual and philosophical undercurrent, which has set us apart from many of our garage-punk contemporaries. The Vedic references in "She Spoke" and "When It’s Over" hint at a broader search for meaning, which makes sense considering our upbringing in Show Low—detached from major cultural centers, left to explore deep ideas in our own way.

At the same time, there’s a playfulness in the writing, most notably in "Come On, Sing The Alphabet!", which was my attempt to craft a surrealist, childlike anthem in the vein of The Beatles' "Yellow Submarine." The double meanings and wordplay also add another layer to the album’s themes of youth, experimentation, and the chaos of early adulthood.

How High In The Low Reflects Its Era

The mid-to-late 2000s were an odd time for rock music. The garage rock revival (Strokes, White Stripes, The Hives) was fading, while emo, post-hardcore, and indie rock were taking over. Meanwhile, bands like The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols were being rediscovered, making psych rock a future direction for many bands who started in punk and garage.

High In The Low reflects this in-between moment. It’s too raw and punk-driven to fit neatly into indie rock and too rooted in classic rock and roll to be part of the emo/post-hardcore movement. 

Being from an isolated scene, we absorbed these influences organically rather than by chasing trends. The result is an album that feels honest, unfiltered, and deeply tied to our own musical and personal journey.

Final Impression: A First Chapter in Gorky's Mythology

If this album is Level One of Gorky, it serves as an origin story—the blueprint of what was to come. 

There’s a hunger in the playing, a recklessness in the storytelling, and a charm in its imperfections. 

The fact that it was never meant to be a final product at the time of recording makes its eventual release in 2010 even more significant—it was a delayed but essential piece of our journey.

At the end of it all, High In The Low isn’t just about a band—it’s about a time, a place, and a mindset. It’s about wanting more, taking risks, making mistakes, and figuring it all out along the way. 

And in that sense, it remains timeless.