Track 6, Side 2: Valerie Loves Me by Material Issue
Because we all need a champion in our corner
My dad taught me every epic journey deserves a great soundtrack. My PalliMed Mixtape is the story of my Palliative Medicine Fellowship year, told in 15 songs.
Valerie Loves Me on Apple Music
I am married to a wonderful woman named Valerie. We met in elementary school. Our moms were on the PTA together, and I played tee-ball with her brother. My little brother beat her in the second-grade spelling bee and still brags about it, but she rejected him when he asked her out later. Valerie and I started dating after we sat next to each other on the bus ride home from church camp.
I’ve been crazy about her a long time, so I am naturally drawn to songs addressed to women named Valerie. I know of three great ones.
Amy Winehouse’s Valerie from 2007 features the best vocals. When Amy sings, you feel it in your bones. It moves you deep down. She has a timeless bluesy quality in her voice that makes her hard to place generationally. The power of her soulful singing calls to my mind greats from the past like Shirley Bassey who sang the Goldfinger theme song. Her Valerie sounds like it could have been recorded sixty years ago, or last week. It’s a great one.
Amy left this world too soon, tragically dying at age 27 like so many famous musicians. Her voice lives on. Check out this BBC live recording.
Steve Winwood’s Valerie from 1982 still shines as an anthemic fusion of synthesized pop and blue-eyed soul. You can’t help but smile and bop a little hearing all this transcendent recorded positivity. The octave-jumping synth hook that opens this classic is, in my humble opinion, the single greatest utilization of a synthesizer from the entire 1980s. Not the most virtuoso synth performance (props to New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle) or the most rockin’ (looking at you, Van Halen’s Jump), but simply the best.
Steve Winwood’s is easily my favorite Valerie song. If you have ever seen me jogging alone with my headphones in, and periodically pumping my fist exactly one octave up into the air, now you know why.
But Material Issue’s Valerie Loves Me from 1991 is the Valerie song going on this mixtape. You’re not familiar with this one? I didn’t know this one either until a few years ago when my buddy, Steven, played it for me on a little road trip down to San Marcos, Texas to do some paddling. At first listen, I immediately knew this song would become my family’s new theme song. Scroll back up to the top of this post and click on the link to this song again.
Notice the chord progression and the up and down of the opening guitar riff. Enjoy the simple steady drumbeat, and don’t sleep on the pop-punk, post-New Wave vocal stylings, with just the littlest hints of the plaintive longing we hear in The Cure’s Robert Smith. It’s awfully catchy, and a little edgy, and all fine and good, and alt-rock-y, and it carries you along nicely. But what’s truly great about this song is its incredibly unique chorus—all five seconds of it.
As the verse ends, we transition to the chorus with a quick smooth drum fill. The guitar then gets way noisier, and grungier, and quickly fires off the same exact chord over and over—16 times in fact—like a toy laser gun stuck on automatic fire, or a Black and Decker drill being revved by some trigger-happy handyman. The guitar then cuts out just as abruptly as it arrived, and the singer emphatically and desperately yells, “Valerie Loves Me!” One time. That’s it. End of chorus. Five seconds.
It’s ridiculous, and I love it. It’s a celebration, a declaration, a pronouncement, a plea. I don’t know another song with a chorus structure like that. Plenty of songs, like Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love, are similar in their simplicity, but they usually repeat the catch phrase at least 4 times. Not this song.
Many things have come together to make this fellowship year possible—support from my family, patience from my children, incredibly understanding and encouraging faculty, a very patient fellow trainee, a million answered prayers. How many under-acknowledged and unrecognized graces and mercies accompany any transition like this!
If I could highlight one thing, though, that has made it possible to exchange my ER income for a fellows’ salary, to trade in seasoned veteran standing for the insecurity of newbie status, to shake up our whole family work-life dynamic, to withstand the emotional highs and lows of this new line of work, my answer would be just as succinct and silly and emphatic and desperate and declarative as this song’s chorus:
Valerie Loves Me!
I would be nowhere without the undeserved support of this amazing woman. Enjoy this hidden musical gem from the early ‘90s. If you’ve never heard it before, you can thank me later, just as I have thanked my buddy, Steven, many times. And be sure to thank the Valerie in your corner, too.
(I don’t graffiti trees, but if I did, maybe I’d do it like this.)
Tell me, Crash Cart Campfire friends:
Who’s the champion(s) in your corner?
Do you love any songs that match the name of a real person in your life? (If you know a Maria, you’re in luck!)
What’s on your mixtape?