Valentine Byrne: “The voices at the very end of this track are me and my sister laughing in the house that burned down.” “It was pretty ironic, losing our home during a stay-at-home order,” says Valentine Byrne, who was recording an EP last April when disaster piled on top of pandemic. “I’ll never forget receiving that phone call from the fire chief informing me there was a fire at my house. He couldn’t tell me how severe it was, so the drive home was pretty surreal. I didn’t know if we had lost everything, or if it was just a small fire. It ended up kind of being somewhere in the middle. The house wasn’t completely lost, my landlords had homeowner’s insurance and recently finished rebuilding it, but it was completely unlivable with the heat and smoke damage. Soot was everywhere, and our stuff still smells like a campfire. That night, we moved in with my mom in La Jolla, and I found my own spot in the area shortly after.”