Kathy Valentine//The Go-Go's

“It's important to me as a writer to push myself out of my comfort zone in order to grow. That's what excites me now.”

With a terrific new memoir called All I Ever Wanted, bassist Kathy Valentine of the Go-Go’s loves exploring new genres outside of songwriting.

As one of the songwriters for The Go-Go’s, Kathy Valentine wrote two of their most popular hits in “Vacation” and “Head Over Heels” as well as several other songs. So we’ve been able to check "killer songwriter” off the list for a while. Now we can add “fantastic prose writer”: All I Ever Wanted is a great book that’s already making some year-end lists. The book starts with Valentine as a young girl and ends with Valentine at age 30, with one constant: rock n roll. There’s the requisite band drama, of course, but this is a book about Valentine, not the Go-Go’s. This is not The Dirt.

Our interview was a discussion about Valentine’s process as a songwriter and a prose writer, with a focus on the latter. You can count on one hand how many times we mentioned The Go-Go’s. Valentine has big plans for more prose; she’s getting her BFA soon and has explored writing in other genres, taking her further from her comfort zone as a writer. I’ll be there for those too.

Watch my interview with Kathy Valentine below.