Heliotrope by Julie Vallimont

In November 2019 I suddenly lost the use of my hands. I've dealt with serious illness for more than 10 years now, but I never anticipated that I would wake up one morning and not be able to use my hands at all. All my projects that I had been working on, everything I had been doing, came abruptly to a halt. I found myself struggling to adjust to life without hands, and also deeply grieving the loss of music and art and so many other things. Music has felt like my main language since I was a child, and without being able to play piano I felt like I had lost the ability to speak.

After months of overwhelming grief, I started to make small forays into the world of music again, tentatively trying to figure out who I could be and what I could still do, picking a note out on the piano here and there, singing a little, trying to write a tune or two. Eventually I went through and gathered tunes from my interrupted projects and some old tunes that never had a home, and realized that I had enough for an album. So I decided to make this album to try to answer the question for myself: what does it mean to be a musician who can't play music?

The process felt mentally exhausting and thrilling and rewarding and strange and futile all at once. I gathered some of my closest collaborators and we set out to bring these tunes to life. This album stretched all of us in new and different ways as we tried out new roles. I became the producer, getting musical ideas across in whatever way I could, singing them, describing them with words, playing them with one finger, dictating them into music software. Anna was incredibly helpful with transcribing and translating my musical ideas. Dana and Noah were so flexible as I asked them to become musical Swiss army knives. With Dana’s encouragement, I found some old impromptu recordings of myself playing piano, and we built arrangements around them. Throughout, grief and loss intertwined with the joy of camaraderie and creation. We laughed and tried wacky ideas and ate delicious food and got snowed in. Together we made something imperfect, awkward, beautiful, quirky, flawed, and yet the perfect reflection of that particular time we spent together.

This album isn't my final album or a definitive statement. It's just making something out of nothing. That's what it felt like in the moment, in the midst of a pandemic, in the dark of winter, after I had been isolated for months in a new town, living alone and struggling to adapt to my new circumstances. Transitioning from survival mode to a place of creation. I’m endlessly grateful to everyone who helped with this project, and for the spirit in people that makes us want to create and brings us together even in the darkest days.

Julie Vallimont is, above all, a collaborator. Whether she is playing piano and accordion for dances, teaching burgeoning musicians, assembling players to bring to life an album of her original music, or creating multimedia visual art, Julie’s work aims to connect with people and draw out the best in them.