Sanya Valkyrie on Walking Through the Flame and the Valkyrie Project

Across sixteen songs, the painter and songwriter explores survival, motherhood and creativity, with the Valkyrie Project at the centre of her wider artistic vision.

Sanya Valkyrie wrote the sixteen songs on Walking Through the Flame in three weeks, drawing on experiences she says had lived inside her for years. Having long expressed herself through painting, she found that songwriting gave those memories and emotions another language.

“Dear Mother” addresses childhood abuse and the difficulty of speaking about painful family experiences. “The Devil Behind the Door” explores surviving assault while preserving the boundaries around what she chooses to share. “I Am the Fire” connects her creative work with her determination to keep building, while “Never Learned to Fade” brings her relationship with her daughter into the album’s account of love, pain and responsibility.

At the centre of this work is the Valkyrie Project, the broader vision that connects her painting, music, character creation, film projects and game development. These artistic branches share thepurpose of bringing the project and its philanthropic mission to life. Understanding that connection is essential to understanding her work, which extends beyond individual songs or paintings towards an interconnected creative universe.

In the interview below, Sanya discusses how these songs emerged, the boundaries she maintains when writing about trauma, and her desire to be understood as an artist, creator and mother whose ambitions extend beyond what she has survived.

Interview with Sanya Valkyrie

1. You created 16 songs in just three weeks, all rooted in real experiences. What made the music come together so quickly?

I think the songs had been living inside me for a very long time before I ever wrote them.

I have spent most of my life expressing myself through visual art, especially painting. When I began writing music, it felt like another door opened. Suddenly, emotions and memories that had been difficult to explain through a painting had a voice.

The 16 songs came very quickly because I wasn't trying to invent stories. I was finally allowing myself to tell stories that were already there. Each song came from a specific emotion, memory, or experience, and once I started, it became almost impossible to stop.

It wasn't really about producing 16 songs in three weeks. It was about finally giving 16 stories somewhere to go.

2. Dear Mother confronts a painful family history. What did turning that experience into a song allow you to express that words alone couldn’t?

Dear Mother allowed me to speak without having to defend myself.

Sometimes, when you try to explain a painful part of your life directly to another person, the conversation becomes about whether your memories are correct, whether your feelings are justified, or whether the other person agrees with your version of events.

Music doesn't require permission.

Writing Dear Mother allowed me to put those emotions somewhere outside of myself. I wasn't trying to punish anyone or rewrite the past. I was simply acknowledging what it did to me.

For me, that song is less about blame than it is about finally giving a voice to a part of myself that had been silent for a very long time.

3. The Devil Behind the Door deals with surviving assault. How did you decide what to reveal through the song and what needed to remain yours?

That was one of the most important boundaries for me.

I wanted the song to speak about survival without turning my trauma into something for people to consume. There are details that belong to me, and they will always belong to me.

What I chose to share was the emotional truth: the fear, the feeling of being trapped, the aftermath, and the struggle to reclaim yourself.

I don't believe you have to reveal every detail of what happened to prove that something happened.

Sometimes the strongest statement is simply: I survived, and I am still here.

4. I Am the Fire connects painting, music and creativity. Do you experience those different forms of art as separate outlets or parts of the same process?

They are absolutely part of the same process.

I don't really see myself as a painter who also makes music, or a musician who also paints. I see myself as an artist who uses different languages.

A painting can express something without saying a single word. A song can enter places emotionally that an image cannot. Film, characters, storytelling and even game development give me other ways to build worlds and invite people inside them.

The medium changes, but the impulse is the same: I want to create something that makes people feel something.

I Am the Fire represents that perfectly. It is about refusing to disappear, and that idea exists throughout everything I create.

5. Never Learned to Fade looks at your relationship with your daughter. How did writing from that perspective affect the emotional tone of the album?

That song brought a completely different kind of vulnerability.

When you write about yourself, you can speak about your own wounds. When you write about someone you love deeply, you become much more protective of every word.

My relationship with my daughter is part of my identity as much as my art is. Writing from that perspective reminded me that life isn't only about what happened to us. It is also about what we choose to pass forward.

There is pain in the album, but there is also love, resilience and hope. Never Learned to Fade helped bring that side of the story forward.

6. You describe music as a protective bubble. What does that creative space give you that everyday life doesn’t?

When I create, the outside world becomes quieter.

That doesn't mean the problems disappear. It means that for a while, I am no longer defined by them.

Inside that creative space, I can transform fear into sound, anger into colour, memories into characters, and pain into something that can actually exist outside of me.

That is why I call it a protective bubble. It isn't an escape from reality. It is a place where I can process reality without allowing it to destroy me.

Creation has always been one of my ways of fighting back.

7. Your songs come from very specific experiences, but you want listeners to find their own stories in them. How do you keep something deeply personal from becoming too closed-off?

By leaving space for the listener.

I can tell my story, but I don't want to tell people what they are supposed to feel.

Someone may listen to The Devil Behind the Door and hear my experience of survival. Someone else may hear their own struggle, their own fear, or their own moment when they finally decided to leave something behind.

Once a song leaves the artist, it becomes part of the listener's world too.

That is one of the most beautiful things about art. You can create something from your own life and somehow it becomes part of someone else's.

8. Did you write these songs primarily to process what happened, or did you discover their meaning only after they were finished?

Both.

Some songs were very intentional. I knew exactly what I needed to say before I started writing.

Others surprised me.

There were moments when I finished a song and realized that I had expressed something I hadn't consciously understood before writing it.

That's one of the reasons I love creating. Sometimes the artist thinks they are telling the story, but the story is actually revealing something about the artist.

The meaning doesn't always arrive first. Sometimes you create the work and then discover what it was trying to tell you.

9. You move between painting, songwriting, visual art, game development and film. How does working across so many mediums change the way you think about storytelling?

It makes me think in worlds rather than individual pieces.

When I paint, I think about a moment. When I write a song, I think about emotion and movement. When I create characters or develop a game universe, I start thinking about what happens before the story, what happens after it, and what exists beyond the frame.

Each medium teaches me something different.

Painting taught me atmosphere. Music taught me emotional rhythm. Characters taught me personality. Film taught me movement and visual storytelling. Game development taught me world-building and interaction.

Putting all of those things together has changed the way I create. I don't just want to make individual artworks anymore.

I want to build universes that people can enter.

10. After putting so much of your life into this album, what feels most important for people to understand about the person behind the songs?

I don't want people to see me only through what happened to me.

Yes, there is pain in these songs. There are difficult chapters. There are things I have survived that changed me forever.

But I am not my trauma.

I am an artist. I am a creator. I am a mother. I am a woman who keeps building, even when life tells me to stop.

This album isn't a monument to everything that hurt me. It is evidence that those things didn't get the final word.

If people remember one thing about me, I hope it is this:

You can be wounded and still create. You can be exhausted and still dream. You can lose pieces of your life and still build something that outlives you.

That is what this music means to me.

(•)> That's all, Folks! Check it out on the Pigeon Opinion Playlist