Artist Profile: Valentin Prince

Photo Credit: Elyza Reinhart

Valentin Prince’s winding musical journey, which began as a child listening to his father sing Bob Dylan songs as he walked through the halls of their house outside of Boston and came to fruition  in the small, passionate scene of Harrisonburg, Virginia, has left him with an endless array of imprints and fascinations— one that has been expressed in various forms in each of his unique solo releases.

From the indie overtones of his self-titled debut to the R&B sphere that his most recent project—For Real— takes on, it has been this assortment, and a genuine love for experimentation and self-expression, that has allowed Valentin to evolve into a chimeric artistic presence, etching out his creative consciousness across each successive release.

As mentioned, Valentin’s earliest musical memories center around his father, Tom, whose interest in jazz and classic rock transferred rather directly to his son. Valentin picked up the guitar for the first time around the age of eight, when his father taught him the riff  to “Secret Agent Man” by Johnny Rivers. Guitar became Valentin’s primary interest rather quickly. He would spend hours in his room practicing the instrument and attempting to emulate the guitarists and classic rock figures that became his heroes.

As he got older, and hip-hop entered his musical sphere, Valentin’s enthrallment only grew more intense.

“I think I've always just been so fascinated by Black American music. My taste has always kind of leaned that way, and I think part of that is I was really into blues... And then all the classic rock and all those heroes that we idolize are still, in some way, emulating these old bluesmen, you know, the Delta Blues guys. So I think that has always been there.”

As he got older, he gained enough confidence to venture into the open mic circuit around his hometown of Somerville, performing a handful of Tom Waits covers and original songs to small crowds. Valentin’s musical tastes have evolved drastically since then, but it was through these experiences that he first gained a sense of his abilities as a songwriter.

By the time he was eighteen, though, he had discovered a new obsession— cycling. He packed up all his belongings and began a lengthy journey across the country on his bike. Living on the road, he met a number of people who would help inform his widening perceptions of the world around him.

Among those was a group he met on a trail, as he describes it, “in the middle of nowhere”, who invited him to visit them in the Shenandoah Valley. They lived in Harrisonburg, and when Valentin arrived in the small town, he knew he had found a new home.

As small and unassuming as Harrisonburg can be, though, it’s home to a deeply passionate music scene. As Valentin became exposed to it, the interests that had consumed him throughout his youth began to creep back to the forefront of his mind. He eventually formed a band, indie-rock outfit Prince Bellerose, and it was with them that, for the first time, he was forced to reckon with the years he had spent technically mastering his instrument— what did it mean to play with a band in a live setting, and who was he as a guitarist in this sphere?

“I think the energy and the emotion of rock... started to come more into the front of my mind, having to play with a band. Because, you know, you play a show, and I think you have to directly respond to what the feedback is that you get. I found that, you know, playing guitar solos with a lot of notes was not awesome. But if I just hit a distortion pedal and play just a couple notes and like really felt it, I started to key into that more. You can really feel it in the room, you know, it's a total shift. ”

As he unlearned many of the jazz-rooted, technical compulsions he had picked up as a teenager, he began to feel a freer form of expression bubble forth. He built a rudimentary home studio, and began etching out his own work in addition to his work with his band.

Valentin’s songwriting process has always been closely related to his own personal music-listening tendencies. He has often fallen in love with a small subset of artists for a period of months, and those artists have always directly shaped his immediate creative processes.

When he began working on his self-titled debut, those artists were, among others, Mac DeMarco and Unknown Mortal Orchestra. He then returned to his jazz roots with Nexus, an instrumental jazz-trio project that was released earlier this year, although it was recorded shortly after the release of his solo debut.

When he began the drafting process on For Real, which was meant to be his third record, he had recently become infatuated with the R&B and neo-psychedelic rhythms of Steve Lacy and Mk.gee. But before he could truly begin to work on the project, a heartbreak and the resulting personal turmoil turned him back to the studio in an entirely different state of mind. In a span of just two weeks, he wrote and recorded the entirety of 2025’s Kiss Your Hands, a deeply folk-forward and sparsely-arranged affair.

He returned to work on For Real refreshed, and for the first time, he had a full and stable studio set-up, including a drum set, with which he could experiment. He set about etching out more rhythm-based tracks, leaning into the imperfections that came with his inexperience in the genre.

“Drums are not my first instrument. I'm not really a great drummer. I can just kind of hold the pocket on some things... I think I was able to use that limitation and make something interesting out of it. It’s a lot of the totally rigid hi-hat of the drum machine mixed with me playing hi-hat with some feeling, so it's pretty cool. They get off each other sometimes, but it just makes it sound fat and interesting.”

Yet from the first, irresistible rhythms of “Interested” to the laid-back tones of “Drive Thru”, the energies of For Real are distinctly memorable, carving out a niche between the guitar-driven sheens of his earlier works and the artists whose influence he was working under in the course of creating the project.

Now, as Valentin heads back into the studio, and his array of impressions and sonic interests continues to widen, he plans to return to some of that singer-songwriter ethos that both defined the earliest days of his musical interest and the short, passionate period in which he produced Kiss Your Hands. It might be different, like his previous projects, from what his fans have grown used to.

But at the center of Valentin’s creative impulse is an ever-wandering passion— one that his growing audience has come to appreciate as a distinct aspect of his continuous articulations.

“I think I've just drank the alt-country Kool-Aid a bit, living in the South and maybe it’s finally seeped in enough. Like my guitar playing has definitely become twangier; I’m using the bridge pickup more... Yeah, it'll be another huge change up. So any fans that I have made will be like, ‘What the f*ck is this?’ [laughs]. But I'm trying to create for the joy of doing it primarily, so I'm just chasing that.”