Sam Valenti IV on Herb Sundays, Ghostly After Dark, The Dare, Good Bits, and Embracing Cautious Optimism

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers also receive a Baker's Dozen playlist every Friday featuring songs I've been listening to, along with some criticism written around them—and in April, I'm running a month-long 25% off sale on annual subscriptions. That's $22.50/year instead of the usual $30. Grab it here.

As a music listener, I've long been a fan of what Sam Valenti IV has done with the Ghostly label since firing it up from an Ann Arbor dorm room back in 1999. Ghostly has since become something of a powerhouse in the decades since, and apparently he was not content to rest on his laurels. I've been mightily enjoying his Herb Sundays newsletter, which has been running for at least three years now and spotlights interesting and notable creative minds along with their own playlist go-to's. As I often say, he's been "on the list" to talk to for a minute, and we had a great extended convo a few months ago that I'm happy to present to you now.

I really love what you've been doing with Herb Sundays. Tell me about what led you to launch the newsletter.
I'm not a failed writer because I didn't try hard enough to be a writer. I have a massive respect for writers and journalists and have always connected with that personality type, if there has historically been one, because I respect people who can observe a moment, a record, or an artist and get at why it matters. I know there's a lot of conversation about "the end of music journalism," but there's still going to be a need for people who can—whether they're critics, on TikTok, or whatever lane they're on—explain to us why we like or don't like something in a way that's exciting. I've always admired it, I'm a student of it—but I also never felt comfortable really putting that stuff out there, apart from on socials, even though it helps me make sense of stuff I like.

Sometimes, on the newsletter, it's stuff where I don't really realize the relationship I have with the curator until I start writing. This last week was with Ian from the Designers Republic, who are in my Mount Rushmore of graphic designers. Again, I'm not a designer, but I love design. So it was like, "Oh, wait, this group of people influenced me and millions of others, but in a way that I didn't really quite realize." It's like unpacking fandom. I joke that it's like living obituary, but it's not about age or anything. I just like putting down how I feel about positive stuff and people that I care about. They don't have to be famous, but I'm showing why I think they're amazing. 

I joke that it's like a prayer for fandom. I'm paying my fan tax. Being a fan is, especially now, competitive and athletic. To be a fan of Star Wars, you have to watch every movie and all these TV shows. I don't feel like a fan of much. I'm not really a true gamer. I used to be a comic book kid. I was a baseball card kid. Music's the only lane that I still feel—but even so, you realize how little your fandom...

You know, I'll think I'm a badass because I did an interview, and then Joshua Minsoo Kim is like, "I did a three-hour Zoom last night, and I have three hours of Zoom in the morning." There's music I've never heard. I love that. It humbles you. But, I also feel like I do have opinions and experience with this stuff, and I do like the idea of putting people onto stuff the way that the journalists I love do, even if it's not new—and especially if it's off-cycle. It's keeping me honest, forcing me to dive in on people's work. For that week, I can listen to their catalog with fresh ears, and it helps me renew my vows in some ways. It's like Strava. "I did my seven miles on Sunday."

I mean, the Sunday Scaries are real. Where do I put that energy? This is a weird way to do so. I'm not a Sunday guy—I actually don't like Sundays. So in a funny way, the newsletter is a way to sublimate that tension.

I find it really valuable and fun when I find out that there's more to know or hear from an artist. But also, it has become a little competitive. And I do think there's a lost art to just learning things, if that makes sense.
But you accept that it's your personal journey as a fan. It's not necessarily "I'm the biggest fan" or "I'm the best fan." I don't live and breathe The Dare. I don't put his music on for comfort. But I was able to listen to it and be like, "Here's why I think this project is not the end of society. It's not threatening the world." It makes sense why this guy's doing a good job of creating a party atmosphere in a world that's lacking youth-led pop party music.

It's almost like becoming your own critic of your own ideas. My instincts—being my age, the Gen X reflex—are, "Everything's scary. Let me unpack why." Maybe I still feel anxious about it, but I ultimately end up becoming more comfortable with the artist's work the more I sit with it and understand what it is, even if it's against my own bias. I'm sure you have that with your career, where it's fun to be almost wrong about your first instinct on things.

It's a relief!
Exactly. It means that you haven't figured everything out. I love that about what music critics do, and I'm just adding my two cents to the kitty.

I have plans to talk to The Dare for this newsletter soon, by the way.
Good. My friend's like, "Dude, are you sure you want to, like, stan for The Dare?" I'm not stanning. I'm just explaining that I think kids need ethical sleaze music. A lot of them have fun! We can't shame them out of enjoying their youth. It's extremely equal-opportunity, everyone's included. Why not have somebody do it that has some character? I thought his playlist was great. It's also like truth serum: Do you have it or do you not? And I was like, "Oh, this guy has the sauce."

Tell me about growing up in Detroit as a music fan. Obviously, it's a massive city when it comes to musical history.
Growing up in the 'burbs of Detroit was and is a huge part of Ghostly. It's the DNA of my taste. There's the obvious stuff: My parents were into Motown, I have my dad's Four Tops records that he got in college. Because of my age and the monoculture, hip-hop was the lane I took as a teen. There was obviously a well-trodden path of hearing In Utero and being like, "That's the record." Then there was Doggystyle.

There was so much good music coming out at the time. Hip-hop wasn't really the Detroit thing, but you had radio DJ culture.I was too young to go to clubs, but the radio on the weekends—and it's still true, to some degree—you'd have mixed shows live from the clubs, and the local DJs would play. I see ghetto tech and booty house being original regional styles—the Baltimore club of Detroit, or the juke of Detroit. It's cool that bands like Hi Tech are bringing that fresh back.

In the mid-'90s, when jungle started coming over, they'd mix it import jungle vinyl around midnight. They'd play hip-hop with it, and obviously Detroit techno. Things didn't seem quite as genre-fied, and that's still a big part of the Ghostly ethos:funk-driven, beat-driven, rhythm-driven music.

When I started sneaking into clubs, my friend House Shoes was a DJ—he did a Herb Sundays—and I'd buy records for him at the record store. If I went with him early in the evening to Saint Andrews Hall. I was going to the club with X'd-out hands so that I could enjoy the music loud. Rave was in its last gasp in Detroit, so I got to enjoy the end of that era, which switched me more onto electronic music. Obviously, at the same time, you have Warp putting out some of their best records of the late '90s.

It doesn't get talked about enough, but you also had space rock like Windy and Carl. We put out records by KILN, who were part of that crew originally. But the ambient shoegaze side of things was a subtext that I didn't pick up onto later. The area is very fertile, and it's a great city to make music in.

Walk me through the foundation of Ghostly as a label.
I still DJ for fun, but DJ'ing was a way to get involved with music in a way that I didn't have the skills to write. The beats I made were subpar in a pre-internet way. You could buy two records and mix the a cappella with the instrumental, and you felt like you did something. You could make a tape out of it. I loved that participant aspect with DJ'ing, and because there were so many local labels that the Detroit techno originators started, you'd go to the record stores and the labels would say P.O. Box Redford, Detroit, Royal Oak, or Ann Arbor.

You'd realize that these were local pressings. You'd see the guys come in—local producers would bring the records in and drop them by the box. Making a record felt very regional, and starting a label didn't seem like the biggest deal. It just was like, "Oh, well, you could put a record out." It was probably similar to how it was for hardcore 7" records—it's just plausible.

I had the idea for the label in high school. I was DJ Space Ghost, which is really corny, but that's partially where it comes from. I kept seeing Ghostly in books and stuff, and I liked the rhythm of it. I knew I wanted to do a label. I didn't quite know what I was going to put out, but the label preceded the artists. Then I was like, "I'm going to do it," and I got to college and met Matthew Dear, Dave "Disco D" Shayman, and some other people like Todd Osborne and Tadd Mullinix in a short succession. I finally got a record out in '99—a 500-copy 12" by Matthew and Disco D, and it went from there. Obviously you put a record out and you start to get demos, and the snowball starts rolling.

You gestured towards this before—how bouncing around between genres, the dual-headed fixation of hip-hop and electronic music, ended up being built into Ghostly's DNA. Tell me about how the label continues embracing that slippery approach to genre.
It's obviously commonplace and widespread with younger generations of listeners. I feel like it's not even a topic anymore. Sadly and similarly, the idea of labels has its own question mark around it. It matters to some people a lot, or it doesn't matter to most people.

Also, if I'm being honest, we're not really doing a ton of different genres. We don't have country records. Our base is largely American, European, and Australian. It's not terribly diverse as far as true genre. But the idea that labels can dictate a path that's unexpected is nice. We partnered with and became an affiliate of Secretly Group in 2020, after I'd been doing the label as a sole founder with a small team for 20 years. It felt really good because I feel like people are like, "Oh, are you doing more?" We put out a Julie Byrne record last year, we just announced the Hana Vu album, I'm excited about Crushed, I've been trying to sign Bullion since 2009. Kate Bollinger has an album I'm supremely excited about this year.

Everyone's like, "Are you doing more indie or guitar music?" And I'm like, "Well, this is the music we listen to." This is actually the music I go home to and enjoy. It's just that we are now allowed to be a good home for it, and there's more trust with managers and artists, and hopefully there's longevity in the size and scale of our distribution. But, I mean, I was trying to put out records in like '03, '04 that were laptop shoegaze records—Dykehouse, School of Seven Bells. Even Matthew Dear, most of his solo albums are pop, like Brian Eno funk records—whatever you want to call them.

So it's nice that we're finally in our actual form in some ways. It's not like we've changed. It just feels good, and the audience doesn't care as long as it's good and well-represented, so it's become easier to be ourselves with time. But there were moments, and still are, where you feel like maybe—and I think all labels go through this—"Am I barking up the wrong tree?" It's cliché, but you have to stick to doing stuff that you and the team care about, because it will get you over the hurdle when things aren't going well. "I still love this project. I don't care if it didn't blow up." It's still good, you know?

Tell me more about the Secretly deal. What's changed for you and Ghostly as a result?
It's been great. Obviously, like everything in music, it was harder to, to connect physically for a period of time at the top of the decade. But, the rose-colored glasses that are often put on the past, I'm guilty of as well. We turned 25 this year. The label doesn't necessarily reflect the reality of the time, and I'm not saying that now is...my opinion is that there's never been a wonderful time to be an artist. It's always a hard job. It has been forever. The arts are exceedingly hard to be successful in. I don't think that's problematic to say. So I look back and I go, "Well, yes, there was maybe less signal to noise, the margins on CDs were better." You could start something yourself with less impediments.

When I look back, I'm proud of the team, our endurance, and doing everything we've done through this technological change. The story of the label is perfectly aligned with the recent history of technology and music. I got my first high-speed T1 line in my freshman dorm room at Michigan in late '98. I jumped right in and piracy hit me in that moment—and obviously that was a positive in retrospect, as far as distributing music or at least showing that the music fandom was alive.

Obviously, as CDs waned, downloads grew, and socials came out, all these crazy shifts force you to stick to a common theme and try to maintain whatever integrity you wish to maintain, aesthetic or otherwise. I know myself, and I'm not someone who wants to manage a hundred people. It's not my skill set. I like small teams, but I also think music has become more professional. My favorite labels are vinyl-only, Bandcamp-only, or digital only, and the songs disappear in a week. I love that you have the expression of form now where you can do micro-labels, and the idea that anybody with a BandCamp or a SoundCloud has a label. That's ideal. I'm for less barriers to entry.

But, to do a good job for the artists that we work with internationally, it helps to have people that are all about quality music and care about the work. It's a network. It is, to quote Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, about interdependence. It's true. The world that I came up in, with alt-weeklies, radio, record stores, house parties—obviously, that's changed a lot and now. There's only a couple of outlets where people find music or discover it.  You can't really replicate that, but you have to be really on your game and signal and message music well if you're going to work with artists who want to make an impact.

Being able to work with a room of professionals who work the stores, distros, sub-distros, and venues, it's a hard find for artists right now. You gotta get a lot of it right, and the missing piece is always luck. All the smartest people I've talked to at any industry admit that you leave room for luck to happen, but you have to get a lot of stuff right for luck to happen, you know? The records, the metadata, the bios—all those little pieces. Much as I liked the idea of going back to a hand-stamped 12" label, I think I'd be doing a disservice to what Ghostly wants to be as a label.

So having partners and a smart group of people in the global Secretly network really has helped. We'll see how the music comes out, but the A&R policy and the ethos is still the same. It's more just, how can we do a better job for the people we work with?

We've alluded several times to the struggles that have accompanied all the changes and downturns in the music industry—which were taking place well before COVID. Tell me about dealing with those struggles yourself.
In my mind, struggle is a perpetual thing. It's like Whac-a-Mole. "Vinyl's booming." Well, for who? Vinyl's booming, so there's no capacity at the plants. So then it's like, "Well, we should have more capacity." And now there's a lot more capacity, but the cost of goods has gone up as a result, so vinyl's now more expensive.

I don't have a salad days memory of my time in the music industry. Maybe that's just because I'm not a good operator. I never felt like we've had a sweet spot. We've had definitely moments where the creative, the projects, and the timing got right, and we've had records that perform better than others because of that. "Well, you did good on this, but you could've done more physical or didn't lean far enough into X."

COVID's an easy smoking gun, but it's not an honest appraisal. I actually think COVID reaffirmed a lot of peoples' love of music. That obviously includes connecting with physical. We make fun of the livestream thing, but that was actually exciting for a second to see artists adapt and try things. So I don't think COVID killed anything, it just changed behavior maybe exposed some of the strangeness that was already there. Maybe we don't need X, Y, and Z. Maybe we are over indexed on certain things.

Shawn Reynaldo did a piece at one of his newsletters about how club culture changed and, a whole generation that would've been going to the club are sitting on the sidelines and looking at things like Boiler Room and being like, "Oh, that's club culture now." You're supposed to be behind the DJ—you're part of this set piece. And I'm not judging. If I was 13 and I watched that, I would assume that clubs were like that. Even those micro-schisms create little ripples in the culture., and it takes a while for like things to settle.

There's also a lot of ageism in both directions. Things got accelerated by a few years. People who were starting their career or their time in the city moved out. Some people hung up their spurs. Some people became more purposeful with their work. It feels like a sci-fi paperback, where time accelerated in a weird way even though it stopped for the music industry—and we're still feeling the effects of it. I don't think we really started feeling it until last year. Maybe we're really, truly caught up.

There's also a lot of things to follow now. There's a lot of media. I don't think music is in competition with itself. I don't think Taylor Swift's the problem. She's not gobbling. It's not her fault that she's good at what she does. Maybe it's the major labels' fault for not diversifying and building more long-term talent. Maybe there's more interesting worlds out there that don't include the things that we value. If I was 13, I'd probably be a Fortnite kid more than I'd be worried about what record came out.

You have to do what you're good at, and we all have to hold our line and ethics. But we also have to let new voices in. I've covered Derrick Gee and people who are doing this new type of journalism. They're allowing fandom to happen on the places where kids actually are. I had to figure out that this is how I'd probably be learning about music if I was a certain age. The old big brother/big sister network has changed.

You have cool stories like Duster with Numero, Pavement's "Harness Your Hopes," and obviously the Kate Bush moment. I like that there's this new roulette happening where good songs can live again. Maybe the closest we've been in the past was Christmas #1s in the UK. Part of doing our collective music industry job is being aware and open-minded—letting things happen. But the other part is having some degree of values, opinions, and taste, and it's hard to hold both in your mind at the same time.

A lot of what I write about is the tension of those things and, what would I do with the label. We're not really putting out the most forward-thinking music that I'm hearing—funk from Brazil, Regal86 from Mexico. We're putting out pretty time-honored styles: Rock guitar, or synthesizer bass music. We're not as radical as we all think we are. But we're trying to connect with people and create space for artists to have great ideas and tell stories, and that's time-honored. That's not going to change.

Yes, AI is going to gobble a lot of things, good or bad—but people are still largely going to want stories about people doing interesting things. Yes, there will be a variant of the pop star that's mechanized or intangible—but I'd argue that's already kind of happening. And maybe that's cool, too. I want to see ABBA holograms. I want to see Daft Punk in 20 years in Vegas. I want to see how things translate. But there's less and less stuff that can fill those rooms. How am I going to see Pedro the Lion in 20 years, what would that mean to a kid? Is it a tribute band? A hologram? A listening room, like a Japanese listening bar?

Maybe we can't support the scale of another major festival, but I would go to the equivalent of a local cinema playing old movies on Saturdays, where you'd go listen to an album with friends and sit and chat—coffee shop vibes. It feels like the past is in communion with the present more and more—we just haven't quite figured out how to tie it all up.

Everyone loves to be a soothsayer. That's also the music business. Half of it is believing in the thing that you're working on, and that it's going to be successful. I don't judge that. But there's so much where we all think we know how things are going to turn out. It's a very Twitter-friendly attitude—we know that works, people like strong proclamations, people love doomsday theories. It's funny, if you look at articles about home taping or TV being like, "We all think we're geniuses because we all watch too much TV." Everyone hates the new thing and whatever it represents, but it's also us kind of telling on ourselves, right? We hate socials, because we love socials. If we didn't use it, we wouldn't hate it, because we wouldn't care about it—but we hate that it works, because it's the best dopamine switch ever.

It's not that these things are so bad—they're too good. If you change that mindset, it's like they're not anything—they're just things. The leadership behind them is another situation, but it's just technology, and you can assume that it's trying to kill you or steal everything, or maybe you're like, "It's good that artists use it to make better things," even if it's making fun of the thing. Then there's Nam June Paik, who's like, "I use technology in order to hate it appropriately." You can also sit on the sidelines and be like, "I don't want to look at that because it makes me hate the people involved," or "Tech is bad," or "AI is going to kill everything."

I've gone through all these stages of grief with AI—with people I work with, including designers. I'm terrified about it. But the more designers I talk to who are using it, the more pleasure they're having with it and the stuff they're going to make with it. It's also probably hypocritical, especially for someone who loves electronic and sample-based music, to be mad about using so many technologies. The basis of all the stuff I grew up on is illegal and immoral to people, and it still is. You have to pull yourself a little bit into the historical context. Things have been burning—the fire didn't just start. What you do with it is how you're judged in history.

Tell me about the mystery of "Ghostly After Dark."
The best use of tech is often the wrong one, right? Even with electronic music—the scratch is wrong, the 303 squelch is misused, even like the 808 is not supposed to go that hard. The Ghostly After Dark voice was trying to make fun of the conspiracist MAGA attitude, but applying it to a banal set of circumstances—but then it became unfunny, because a lot of the stuff ended up kind of being true, or too close to home.

I like crafting high stakes around low-stakes topics, because then it becomes this like funny inversion. I'm sure you've dealt with this, but stan armies actually are scary. People do believe everything they read, and the reckoning came true, so there's no unmasking to be done. You just try to ride the moment, and I thought that was a fun misuse of a platform that held our attention for a minute.

I'm always appreciative of a good bit that blends absurdity and aesthetic. I have to rein myself in with bits quite a bit sometimes.
You do good bits—you're a world-class bits man. I've always enjoyed your bits.

I'm like the guy at the Dow Jones stock terminal being like, "When do you think this bit will break? Should I not do this bit any longer?"
I think humor is the highest form of intelligence. It's also like a comfort blanket. It used to be a sad song or a Smiths record that provided my sense of communion with the world, and now it's humor. "Alright, I'm not insane, someone else thinks this is funny, even if it's deeply stupid. We haven't lost the plot."

The most serious music is funny. I think about Kraftwerk a lot, and the Misfits. It's hysterical. Even Adult., who we work with and are one of the funniest bands of all time. The best musicians are often the funniest, even if they don't cop to it.

The Midwest, in particular, has always been a fount for funny people and comedy in general. Why do you think that is?
My mind immediately went to Canada, which also gets that tag. The similarity is that they both have strong norms around a code of conduct. Being pleasant and hard-working are virtues, so the people who are funny in those conditions—that pressure cooker of fitting in or observing these kind of quotidian things—are creating their own escape hatch to survive. You're trying to get out of your skull and your skin.

People also forget that Detroit techno is about fantasy. It's not just about steel workers, it's about imagining something better. When we reissued Emeralds' Does It Look Like I'm Here?, I thought about that steel-gray Ohio and Michigan sky, just having to create something positive and colorful out of it.