Track Of The Day 26/2 - Valentina

'You Know Where My Happiness Went'

*Valentina's* voice will no doubt be familiar to you.

A potent performer, she's work in the studio and on tour with the likes of Kano, Lil Silva, and Kindness, but is perhaps best known for her mighty Joe Goddard collaboration 'Gabriel'.

That dropped in 2012, though, and since then she's taken a step back, moving through a phase of introspection.

With a relationship coming to an end Valentina began to feel a flood of different emotions, both her external and internal life in flux.

Ideas raced through her mind, ways to pin down what she was feeling as her life altered in substantial and often frightening ways.

New single 'You Know Where My Happiness Went' is her summation of that period. Opening in wisps of electronic sound, it gradually finds focus, with Valentina's startling, highly expressive vocal at the centre. 

She explains...

"I wrote this song after a five year relationship had just ended and I was looking for a place to live, staying on friends' sofas. With no microphone, the whole vocal was recorded into my laptop in my friends living room in one take as I wrote it."

"I didn't change it as I liked that it captured that precise moment in time. In a lot of ways the song is about loss, loss of love, of identity and learning to be alone, getting to know and like yourself. I realised I'd spent too long expecting my happiness to come from someone else's idea of me."  

A stunning, vastly powerful return, you can check it out now.

Photo Credit: *@margotbowman*

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