Death Valley Girls’ Bonnie Bloomgarden Talks Channeling the Earth

When you look at a sunset, what do you see? How about a poppy or a panting dog? Or even a wildfire? When Bonnie Bloomgarden, frontwoman for the ethereal rock band Death Valley Girls, sees these things, they speak to her. They share mysteries, melodies. Ideas. For Bloomgarden, her power is in hearing music, lyrics in nature. And somehow, the stuff she makes from these inspirations turns into portals and incantations for the rest of us.

For evidence of this, look no further than DVG’s newest LP, Welcome To Earth, which is out Friday (October 9). The record is the result of blissful moments, heavy loss, and strings of days steeped in confusion and uncertainty—all interpreted through the very natural world that surrounds us all.

“That’s how channeling works,” Bloomgarden tells American Songwriter.

It was about two years ago when the LA-based Bloomgarden moved to a new part of SoCal. Life was good. Then she lost everything in the LA wildfires. Adding extra heft to the moment was that her dog Tommy was ailing. Bloomgarden tried to speak with her, asking what Tommy needed, from surgery to metaphysical care. Eventually, though, her dog passed.

“She left her body,” Bloomgarden says. “Then I was super broken. I couldn’t handle it. I’d never felt anything like that.”

One day, though, Bloomgarden decided to take a walk, the same route she and Tommy used to take together. Out on the street, she came across a flower.

“The flower sent me this message,” she says. “It’s exactly what Tommy was trying to explain to me [as she was dying]. It was like a zap in my brain in a way I’d never experienced before.”

The message? Everything is love. Love isn’t a thing. It’s not an object, person. Instead, love is a dimension, Bloomgarden offers. Whenever you feel love, it’s a feeling of a place we’re all from and know in some almost-Platonic way.

Before seeing this flower, Bloomgarden had been searching for something to write about. She was over a year and a half late on a deadline for a new album. But when she received the message from the blossom, she straightened with purpose. She knew what she had to write about. “Love is a dimension,” she says again.

Some songs on the new DVG album are written more traditionally. There’s even a Link Wray cover on the LP of “Fire And Brimstone”, a song with a particularly heavy meaning given all that Bloomgarden lost in the flames of just a few years ago.

But then other songs are inspired by plants and animals. Their messages, the verse they convey just by being—that is, if you’re able to listen like Bloomgarden. Of course, the incandescent performer is not naïve enough to think some of her ideas might sound a bit out there to others. But so be it.

A conversation with Bloomgarden may just as easily end up talking about the existence of aliens as it might about self-care and healing meditations. Her mind is open. And her music is the mystical byproduct.

“I never think about how it’s going to sound like beforehand,” she says. “I don’t care. It’s just about being honest with the message. Our music just sounds a certain way, I don’t know why.”

Death Valley Girls are one of those groups you can identify within 10 seconds of hearing one of their songs. It’s an enviable position. Few bands boast their own true sound. But DVG has it. For prime examples of this on the new album, check out “Message From The Venus Flower” or “How Losing Everything In The Fire Taught Me To Love Myself”. You’ll be floating on the sax and buzzing on the chanting, incantation-like vocals.

“Every song on the record has tons of people singing the whole time,” Bloomgarden says, through a grin. “Almost everything is in unison—I think it’s so cool to have so many voices. My favorite thing in the world is singing with people.”

The past two years have got Bloomgarden’s head turning. She felt low, lost at times—like she was complaining too much about her circumstances, instead of acting on what she needed. But the new record marks a new chapter. She is looking up again.  

“I’ve got to be honest,” she says. “I’m really just coming back to life in a lot of ways.”

But who knows what the future will hold for her and her inspired record? In some ways, Bloomgarden, ever the artist, wishes she could have a simpler, more normal life to come home to when the sessions and tours are done.

“I have fantasies of waking up in the morning, stretching, working out, making a good-for-you breakfast,” she says. “Getting the work done. Laundry on Sundays. Prepping food for the week. I want that so bad. So there’s that…”

Totally understandable. There’s joy in security.

But then again, if she went that way, perhaps the flowers wouldn’t sing quite as they do.

Photo by Patrick Wymore  / Courtesy Terrorbird Media