When Val began in classical music, the composer had already made the biggest decisions. The notes existed, the text was fixed, and her work began with interpretation. Songwriting handed those decisions back to her. The Chilean singer-songwriter eventually moved into alternative pop, where authorship came with a harder assignment: choosing which parts of a lived experience could become public.

Ashes became the first part of a two-album project. Its companion, embers, arrived this month with ten new songs and a bilingual announcement from Val for the listeners who had followed the project to release day. She also singled out composer Sebastián Olguín, thanking him for believing in the record and helping bring it to life. Shortly after embers reached streaming platforms, we spoke with Val about the years, choices and relationships behind her second album.

Hi Val, it’s lovely to speak with you, and congratulations on embers. Looking at an old wound from the other side of Ashes means your memory has already had time to reorganize the evidence. Did you catch your present-day self editing the person you were then, and whose version ultimately entered the song?

Hi Anita! thank you for listening and liking embers!It’s true, there’s been a gap between “Ashes” and “Embers”, but I haven’t changed how I feel about what I experienced, even though my understanding of those experiences has evolved so no, I don’t think there was a need to try to edit my past self. I know how I felt then and how I feel now and that’s why each album tells a different part of a story. My first work “Ashes” tells the stories of how I felt after different traumatic experiences and now on “embers” you find the experiences and wounds themselves. But yes, of course, it’s a mixture of how I was affected by these experiences and how I can now put them into words to express those feelings because I talk about the actual things that hurt me. I’m sure personal growth helped me to understand these life experiences better and see things from a different angle that’s why each album holds its own perspective. 

When a song draws from real life, factual accuracy and emotional accuracy can pull in different directions. On embers, which one held greater authority, and who carries the consequences when that balance shifts?

I think that, as these experiences form part of my story, how they felt to me holds greater authority. Not only because I find it easier to write from that perspective, but also because when I do it that way, I feel like I’m not revealing as many intimate details. Maybe I find it harder to describe the events themselves than to describe how they made me feel. However, in my lyrics, you find a mixture of factual and emotional accuracy. In some songs, I can talk about what a person did and what happened, while at the same time expressing how those events made me feel and what they meant to me. So, I think you can communicate both. As I’m the one writing the lyrics, I feel more comfortable expressing how I felt, and so the listener receives my version of a certain experience. Hopefully, something in it can resonate with them. 

Which track changed personality once it found its final position on embers?

Honestly, I don’t think any of the tracks from “embers” would change because of their position on the album. Once I knew how all the songs were going to sound like, I think I knew the order of each track from the start. Each song tells a different story, has its own mood and context, and rearranging them wouldn’t make a huge difference in my opinion, as their meaning wouldn’t change even if they found another position on the album. It was more important to me that the music had its own cadence throughout the album. I wanted it to be balanced, that there was thematic and musical variety between tracks. I always thought of the album as a complete listening experience. Nevertheless, I knew some things I wanted from the beginning. For example, I always knew that guilty and king pretender would go together, one before the other, or that deep end would go in the middle simply because its nature is so different from the other songs.

Classical training teaches the body to repeat, control and refine. Was there a vocal take on embers that became valuable because emotion disrupted that discipline, and what made you keep it?

The setting on “embers” is completely different from that of a classical context. Therefore, the way you use your instrument has to change. Although these two have different stylistic frameworks, I think some of my classical vocal techniques are very much present here, but this time they play a different role. Many of my songs have long phrases, and for that you need good breath control and vocal agility. The presence of dynamics – piano, forte, crescendo, diminuendo – is very evident, and they have an emotional intention. In this album, everything has to do with conveying emotion, so refinement plays a very small part in it. There were moments where I had to control my technique, such as the use of vibrato, for instance, because I chose to take a different approach that could tell the story better. “Easy” is a great example of a vocal take that became valuable. Every time I sang the word “easy”, I found that my voice sounded a little shaky. I could have changed it, but I kept it because it reinforced the idea that this was anything but easy.  

“Embers” intentionally prioritised making sure that you could feel the anguish, the pain, that feeling of despair in my voice over vocal refinement. The goal here is not to sing in the most perfect way, as it is understood in classical music, because in opera you play a role; you put yourself in someone else’s story. But here, I’m playing myself. This is my emotional truth. 

You thanked Sebastián Olguín for believing in the project. Belief sounds comforting from the outside, though inside a studio it can also arrive as a challenge. At what moment did his belief push you toward a creative decision you might have avoided alone?

Sebastián and I have been working together for many years. He is the composer of the album, and he’s been there for me, supporting new ideas and helping me create music for a long time, so of course, I thanked him. “Embers” exists because of the combination of our two disciplines: his role as the composer and mine as singer and lyricist. Yes, I helped with some melodic themes for some songs, but he made all the rest happen. When we were recording this album, whenever I doubted myself, I turned to him for reassurance. For example, when trying a different vocal approach, making a small change or taking creative risks, he always supported new ideas that could work well alongside his original compositions. When both of us felt comfortable in our respective roles, we found balance. I remember when we were recording “easy”, there was this part where I was unsure about keeping a new melodic line we were trying to pursue. I can still remember him talking to me through the headphones, encouraging me to try it and keep on going. 

After a writing session this emotionally heavy, what are you actually like five minutes later? Do you want silence, company, food, a walk, or something completely ridiculous to pull you back into the day?

The process of writing lyrics for me isn’t always linear. Sometimes I just have a theme and some pointers, and it can take days to make it all make sense. Even though these lyrics are so emotionally intense, I don’t feel too tired after a writing session because I’ve been dealing with these things for years. I think when I sing them, it’s more emotionally powerful for me because it’s like reliving that moment. So afterwards, I like to find a calm activity, do some crafts, or just be in silence for a while to let everything settle in. It’s hard for me to completely disconnect, so even though I’m not literally writing, my mind keeps going over what I’ve just written and how to make it better. Sometimes, when I’m about to fall asleep, I get a new idea! They come at the most random times! 

When someone introduces you as a Chilean singer-songwriter, which part of that context genuinely helps them understand your work, and where would you prefer to lead the conversation yourself?

I like being described as a Chilean singer and lyricist because I would like people to know that there are a lot of interesting things happening in the Chilean music industry right now, and I like to think that I’m part of it. My nationality is another characteristic of my identity; however, I don’t think it defines the sound of my music, maybe because my culture isn’t the main influence on how I wanted “embers” to sound like. For example, the main thing that I would point out is that my music is in English, while here in Chile we speak Spanish. Secondly, I would like people to focus on how this album makes them feel and how its vulnerability can resonate with others. The most important thing to me is that someone can feel emotionally connected to my music.  

Which is more exposing: a stranger understanding one of your songs with uncomfortable precision, or somebody close to you realizing exactly which moment became the lyric?

I think both! As I’ve mentioned before, my songs are in English, and here in Chile, we speak Spanish, so many times people don’t understand what I’m saying and simply enjoy the music as it is. But people close to me are always happy to listen to what I’ve written and have asked me to translate the songs into Spanish. This is where questions like, “Who are you talking to on guilty?” begin, or they want to know everything about each song now that they understand the lyrics but still don’t know the whole story. My friends all speak English so they understand them right away and can relate a lot to the themes, maybe because they see themselves in a particular feeling expressed in a song. Most of them know my story and exactly who is behind each song, or who I’m referring to in a song, so they’ve all been very supportive. People I don’t know who have listened to the album have mostly congratulated me, saying that they really liked it and that it made them feel this or that, and that is incredible to me. That’s the whole point of making music for me.

So, yes, I think both are exposing in different ways. I find it very interesting that a stranger can connect deeply with someone else’s story without knowing them, and at the same time, someone who knows every detail of my life experiences can see how I made something beautiful from something that hurt me so much. That’s captivating but very exposing too.

A private experience changes status once it has cover art, a release date, promotional posts and streaming numbers attached to it. How did you make peace with turning something painful into a public product, and did any part of that process strike you as strangely businesslike?

It is definitely hard to put something so difficult for me out there. Maybe that’s why it took me so long to do it. But I’ve made peace with it, hoping it will help someone else on their own healing journey. My main goal was never to see this as a product, but as a therapeutic way for me to try to deal with everything I was feeling. Writing “embers” was definitely a form of therapy for me. It allowed me to understand, process and learn to let go of so many things that had been hurting me for a long time. This is how I’ve approached it since day one. I did it for myself, and then, when I had the final result, I thought maybe this could be helpful to someone else, just as so many songs kept me company when I was younger. It’s true that I struggled sometimes with making this public because it’s just so raw, and I’m completely exposing myself, but it’s a means to something greater than myself, and that is being there for someone who might need it, someone who is also dealing with pain, feeling like they are not enough, or feeling the same but not being able to put it into words.

But of course, once you have done all the work, there’s a new side of it that you need to start working on, such as the cover, release date, and everything that comes with the idea that this becomes a product, even though it was never created as such in the first place. I made it for me and that’s why it is so personal. The music is more important, and it was never intended to be a product. It’s my story, trying to be there for you. 

You may eventually hear Ashes and embers and disagree with the person who wrote them. If that happens, would you still call the albums truthful? Does a song owe its truth to the event itself or to the artist’s understanding at the moment she wrote it?

I wrote the lyrics for both albums, so I’d have to disagree with myself, which is totally okay, that’s the beauty in healing, it allows you to see things from a different perspective, so I would be perfectly fine with that. However, there has been a four-year gap between “Ashes” and “embers”, and I still find truth in the lyrics that I wrote for “Ashes”. And I think that they would still be truthful to that part of me that wrote them back then. When you write about some things that come from such a deep place in your soul, I think they are always going to be true in some way or another. Yes, you can change your mind about how you feel about something now, but that doesn’t make it, in my opinion, any less truthful.

People change and evolve, and it’s very natural. Sometimes you preserve a bit of your old self, here, for example, in songs. Both statements can be true because, who you were, who you are now, and who you will be, might find some truth in what you wrote about yourself during a specific period of your life. Everything in life doesn’t necessarily need to be objectively true forever, but it was definitely truthful and felt true when I wrote it. 

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