Touted in 2006 by Rolling Stone magazine as one of four Las Vegas bands to watch and tapped to perform at a Warped Tour stop in Ventura, California, last summer, Valentine appeared poised to court major-label interest. But as the group prepared for a January UK expedition in support of Bleed the Dream, the headliners canceled, the trip fell through and the 24-year-old Ellis announced that her future plans did not include performing, or Valentine.
"I got to a point where I felt like I was not in control of my life," she explains. "Things were going good and I was having a lot of fun, but I needed to do something where I was getting where I wanted to be by working hard. I needed to change something."
The UNLV graduate, who once put further studies on hold to rock out with Valentine, has applied to several law schools with an eye toward enrolling this fall. "I want to go into entertainment law. Maybe I'll be [Valentine's] lawyer someday," she adds with a laugh.
Cohan doesn't sound amused by the turn of events, however. "I really feel for the other guys—[guitarist] Jade [Davis] moved here from Idaho and [bassist] Estil [Holliday] moved here from Delaware, just for the band—and now there's not many options for Valentine," Cohan says.
"If you think you can fill Emily's shoes, hit us up. Guy or girl," reads a post on the band's MySpace page (myspace.com/valentinebandlv). "If Emily had just given it six more months, maybe things would have been different," Cohan says. "We'd written 21 new songs in three months, and we were just about to start doing some cooler stuff." At the moment, Valentine's most promising lead has the quartet traveling to Los Angeles for a follow-up audition with Morgan Brown, a 15-year-old singer/songwriter Cohan says already has several key connections within the music industry. "He's looking for a working band, so basically we would kind of morph into what he's doing, which is more mainstream, pop-rock kind of stuff," Cohan says.
"Kind of like a pay-to-play situation. It's not headline news, but financially, it's not necessarily a bad choice."