Ross Valory Embarks On His Own Journey
An interview with the legendary bassist about his solo debut
“I didn’t carve my way into the music business with this solo project; I’ve already had a career,” says Ross Valory, calling from his home just outside of San Francisco. “So for me, this [album] is a sense of freedom, to explore and create and produce music that I really love, and to share it.”
Valory is best known for being the longtime bassist for the rock band Journey – he played on their megahits “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Who’s Crying Now,” “Open Arms,” “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart),” “Send Her My Love,” “Faithfully,” and many more – but he parted ways with the band in 2020. These days, he’s focused on his solo career, for which he released his debut album, All of the Above, earlier this month on April 12.
“I’m very excited about this,” Valory says of All of the Above’s release. “Having a stack of interviews does convince me that this is really happening. It’s been a labor of love – over ten years of recording. And it’s my first foray into the music world beyond a long and fabulous career with Journey.”
Across eight eclectic tracks, All of the Above demonstrates that Valory’s skills go far beyond Journey’s brand of mainstream rock. This is, Valory says, the reason why he named the album as he did: “There’s quite a variety of material. Quite disparate. Many, many different styles. I can’t say that any one of them is a pure style, but it’s more of a fusion or impressionism. So ‘all of the above’ means there’s a lot to choose from – there’s a lot of different things to hear.
“The second meaning [behind the album title] has to do with the fact that these are the first recordings in which I’ve recorded different instruments,” he continues. “Keyboards in ‘Wild Kingdom.’ ‘Windmill’ was written on guitar, and I’m playing all the guitars on that song. And then in two other instances, I’m recording for the first time with two basses – ‘Night Flower’ and ‘No One Wins the War’ have underlying supporting bass parts with fretless solo work.”
A certain cohesion is still evident in the material, Valory adds, because of the careful way these songs were sequenced. “It’s like a set list, a performance list: one bases it on tempo or a key or energy level, so that it breathes and moves and builds, so it has a dynamic flow to it,” he says. “The way the album is sequenced, if somebody turns off their phone, closes their eyes or turns off the light, and just plays the entire album, it is an adventure in itself.”
So far, he has received only positive feedback from fans. “I have no complaints about the amount of attention and the amount of appreciation people have shown me about the music. I’m pleasantly surprised,” he says.
In a way, this solo album has been in the making since long before Valory left Journey.
“The material on All of the Above is the result of finally getting around to finishing what I started,” he says. “These are compositions that have been sitting, so to speak, on the back burner. Some of the material is decades old.”
About a decade ago, Valory finally decided to complete what he’d started with these songs, so he began recording them bit by bit. He didn’t overthink why it finally seemed like the right time; as he simply says, “It was just time to do it.”
Although this is his solo project, Valory is careful to give credit to the many people who collaborated with him to make this album possible, including guitarist Miles Schon (son of Journey guitarist Neal Schon), multi-instrumentalist Eric Levy, and drummer Prairie Prince and keyboardist Michael Cotten (both of the band The Tubes). Prince also created the album artwork.
Ultimately, though, Valory is firmly in control of the material – “It’s got my name all over it, so I guess it’s all my fault, really,” he says with a laugh – so in that respect, it’s been a very different experience for him to put these songs out into the world, compared to his previous album releases with Journey. “Definitely, it’s a completely different feeling,” he says.
He’s clearly enjoying the freedom he has to create these songs as he sees fit, without the constraints of any particular “band sound” to limit him. He credits his parents for instilling an adventurous musical approach in him because they exposed him to a wide range of artists throughout his childhood in the Bay Area.
“In the household or in the car, the kind of music that was on the turntable or on the radio was really varied, so there’s all these influences that I really enjoyed,” Valory says. He can recall listening to everything from classical music such as Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Handel, all the way to jazz, R&B, and rock hits by the likes of Nat King Cole, Ray Charles and Fats Domino.
He also spent a lot of time performing in his church and school choirs, as well as playing various instruments in his school’s band. When he was nine years old, he wrote his first song, an instrumental he wrote while strumming an acoustic guitar. He never gave it a title, though he still remembers the melody – and he thinks he may record it for one of his future solo albums.
VIDEO: Ross Valory “Windmill”
While Valory was still in school, he made a fateful switch to the bass guitar.
“Somebody talked me into joining their little rock band, to pick up the bass guitar,” he explains. “They knew that I could play guitar, so the bass would be easy. So there was this transition midway through high school to popular music. I’m fortunate enough that I followed it up to the point where it was a professional career.”
Within seven years, Journey had been created, and Valory was there from the beginning. That band would go on to dominate the charts throughout the 1980s – in fact, just this year, Forbes magazine declared that their 1981 song “Don’t Stop Believin’,” from their seventh studio album Escape, is the “Biggest Song of All Time.” (That article was based on that fact that the Recording Industry Association of America recently certified the song as reaching 18-times platinum sales.)
Despite that success, Valory doesn’t regret leaving Journey and beginning his solo career. He’s already writing and recording songs for his next release, which he promises will not, as with All of the Above, take a decade to complete. He expects this next album will continue his tendency toward creating stylistically diverse material: “I would say that the horizon will expand further than what people have already heard.”
For now, though, Valory hopes fans will find plenty to like as they listen to All of the Above.
“I hope that they’ll enjoy the variety of styles and influences, and will enjoy something from me beyond the kind of music I was performing and recording with Journey,” he says. “I would think there’s something for everybody there. I like to think it just brings happiness and joy to people.”
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