Ava Valianti Is a Hot Mess, and She Knows It

Ava Valianti’s bedroom ceiling has a door in it. Not a metaphorical door, not some poetic abstraction about escape routes and the upward trajectory of dreams—an actual door, leading to the attic, positioned directly above her bed like a rectangular eye that watches her write songs at 1 a.m. when she should be finishing her AP History reading. The room itself is small, almost defiantly so for someone whose voice has started appearing on Spotify playlists with names like “main character energy” and “that girl era,” and it is a riot of white, purple, pink, and blue, with vinyls from Fleetwood Mac to Lorde to Wings tacked on the walls alongside a massive Olivia Rodrigo poster and a constellation of photos—friends, family, moments captured because taking photos is, she says, one of her absolute favorite pastimes. The desk is a damn disaster. She does most of her writing in bed.

Tonight, she is wearing faded torn jeans and a white spaghetti-strap blouse, barefoot on her bed, mouthing the words to Punch Drunk Love playing on her laptop while sipping a large unsweetened iced tea with lemon from Dunkin’. “It’s the best drink ever,” she says, with the conviction of someone who has thought about this extensively. “I don’t like coffee so I have it almost every day for caffeine.” When asked about other favorite drinks, she lists them off with suspicious enthusiasm: “A non-alcoholic mojito—a nojito—a Shirley Temple, lemonade, kombucha…”

On screen, Adam Sandler is being Adam Sandler in that rare way he sometimes is—wounded, strange, unexpectedly devastating. Ava mouths Barry Egan’s lines between answers, her lips moving to “I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine” with the unconscious muscle memory of someone who has watched this film too many times to count. “He was at the top of his game when he made that movie,” she says of Paul Thomas Anderson, her attention briefly fractured between interview and cinema. “The cinematography is so dynamic, and it’s one of the most uniquely romantic films I’ve ever seen. Plus, it has Philip Seymour Hoffman in it, so it must be perfect.” She pauses. “Letterboxd is my most-used app. That’s probably concerning.”

Her new single is called “Hot Mess,” a term that used to land somewhere between insult and intervention—the friend who showed up to brunch still wearing last night’s outfit and mascara, the coworker whose desk looked like a paper bomb had detonated, the girl crying in the bathroom at prom because her date was dancing with someone else and also she’d lost her phone and also her fake eyelash was hanging on for dear life. But somewhere in the last few years, “hot mess” underwent a linguistic glow-up, transformed from cautionary tale to aspirational chaos, from “get it together” to “she’s got swagger.” It now means: sure, I’m a disaster, but I’m my disaster, and I look hot doing it.

“‘Hot Mess’ is, both fortunately and unfortunately, a deeply autobiographical song for me,” Ava says, glancing around her room as if to offer exhibit A. “I’m extremely messy—not necessarily my living space, although my room is pretty messy right now—but my headspace and mental organization. I’ve never truly been fully put together as a person, never mastered the clean girl aesthetic, and never been ahead of everything all at once.” She used to shame herself for this, comparing herself to those preternaturally organized people who color-code their planners and never miss a deadline and probably fold their underwear. But she’s come around to the gospel of productive chaos. “I realized this was actually my strength. I love living how I do, because I’m authentically myself, I live life in the moment, and try to take advantage of every opportunity that comes my way.”

Ava Valianti has been writing songs since she was nine years old, when she started a makeshift band with her friends called The Songbirds—which is objectively the most nine-year-old band name possible, and she knows it. “I wrote silly songs about relationships I’d never had,” she says, “and didn’t even really know how to structure songs. But it always captivated me in a way I couldn’t really describe or explain.” The pandemic hit when she was in fifth grade, sending her, like so many kids, deeper into herself. But for Ava, that inward turn became a creative excavation. She took a songwriting class before seventh grade, originally intending to record music as a school project. Instead, she reached out to a producer she’d known since she was seven—“he knew my voice teacher and needed some kids to sing on a project”—and everything clicked. “When I stepped foot into the studio and started engaging with the recording process, that’s when I truly realized that this was the only path in my life I needed to take.”

Her first producers, Chris and Tate, became mentors in the truest sense—not the LinkedIn kind of mentor, where someone answers your emails once a quarter, but the kind who helped her find her sound, her confidence, her love for the act of recording itself. “From then on,” she says, “my trajectory was set in stone and I knew that being a singer was the only option for me.”

But here’s the thing about having your trajectory set in stone when you’re twelve: you still have to go to school, damnit! Ava is a junior in high school now—six days a week, because her school operates on Saturdays, which feels vaguely medieval—and she is also a theater kid of the highest order. “I’m the biggest theater kid in the world,” she announces, without a trace of irony. They just finished Into The Woods, where she played Cinderella. Now they’re doing The Play That Goes Wrong, where she’s the Inspector. Next up is Newsies. She has seen The Play That Goes Wrong twice already, because of course she has.

“I go from long school days six days a week to having gigs sometimes two or three times during the weeknights,” she says, “and finding that balance between the two lifestyles has been a crazy and defining experience of my adolescence.” There is something both exhausting and exhilarating about the way she describes it—the breathlessness of someone who is genuinely living two lives at once and loving it, even when it’s too much, even when the homework doesn’t get done, even when she’s mouthing Paul Thomas Anderson dialogue at midnight because sleep is a concept she has a complicated relationship with.

Her phone buzzes somewhere in the bedding—a text, ignored—and she mentions, almost in passing, that her mom is picking her up early tomorrow for a dentist appointment, which means she’ll miss third period, which means she’s not that stressed about the homework situation, actually. Her mom comes up a lot. Not in a stage-mom way, not in a my-mother-is-my-manager way, but in the way of someone whose favorite person is also her ride. “You know how I know when a song is finished?” she says, apropos of the parent mention. “When I get the mix and master and listen to it in my mom’s car.” She laughs before I can. “I know how that sounds. But when all the work is done, I need to know if I’ll be able to listen to it and not have problems. If my head pops up at any point because something sticks out, then something is unfinished and needs to be tweaked. But hearing it with the speakers in a car—I can find the things I really love.” The car test. The are-we-there-yet of the creative process.

The movie has reached the part where Barry Egan tells Lena he’d like to smash her face with a sledgehammer, which is, in context, romantic—this is that kind of film—and Ava is mouthing the lines again, half-watching, half-present. It occurs to me that Punch Drunk Love is, at its core, a movie about a deeply weird person finding someone who loves them precisely because of the weirdness, not despite it. I ask if “Hot Mess” scares off potential love interests—if singing about your own chaos is, perhaps, a bit of a warning label.

She considers this with mock seriousness. “If it does, I’d be shocked, because I think I might just be the least intimidating person I know.” A beat, a tilt of the head, the comedic timing of someone who’s spent years doing theater and knows exactly where the laugh goes. “Sometimes, much to my chagrin.” She says chagrin like she’s been waiting for an excuse to use it—savoring the word, letting it land. Sixteen and already fluent in the art of the self-deprecating flex.

And is there anyone currently undeterred by the warning label? “I am,” she announces, with a flourish that suggests she’s been waiting for this question, “very single.” She says it the way you’d say very busy or very tired—not a complaint, exactly, just a fact of her current existence, like Saturday school or the iced tea dependency. But there’s something else in the delivery, a flicker of self-awareness that suggests very single is not the same as involuntarily single. She knows what she’s doing. She’s sixteen and figuring out that being a hot mess has its fringe benefits—that the girl who writes songs about chaos and wears it like a fucking badge is also the girl who gets to decide when, and if, and with whom. The boys in her orbit may not fully understand the power dynamic at play here, but Ava does. She’s not waiting to be chosen. She’s curating. Badass.

But prom is coming, eventually, and she has thoughts. “I’d want someone pretty chalant,” she says. “I know that’s not a real word, but that’s okay.” (It is not a real word. She is daring you to correct her.) “Someone willing to put themselves out there. Passionate, willing to have fun, and laugh at themselves.” She pauses, recalibrating. “But honestly? The dress and the dancing are the main reason I’d go. Having a date isn’t the priority.” Boys, at this particular moment in her life, are secondary to the sartorial possibilities. She has her priorities in order, even if nothing else is.

She warms to the topic of romance the way only someone who has thought about it extensively and also not at all can—philosophical about the theory, cheerfully inexperienced with the practice. Green flags? “When someone takes time to listen to you, communicates openly, and remembers little details that inform how they see you. It’s so romantic when someone can remember something you said offhand years ago because you’re on their mind.” She’s looking at the photos on her wall when she says this, all those frozen moments of friends and family, the small details she’s chosen to preserve. Red flags? “Being too passive-aggressive. It makes me extremely frustrated when someone doesn’t communicate and instead makes veiled comments. That leads to resentment, nothing gets resolved, and—” she grins, “—that definitely would not inspire a happy song.”

I ask her what tracks on her best Spotify playlist might surprise people. Ava, to her credit, doesn’t flinch. “My top three are probably ‘What A Girl Wants’ by McKayla Twiggs, ‘Disturbia’ by Rihanna, and ‘Sober’ by Lorde,” she says, with the same energy she’d use to recommend a good sandwich spot. McKayla Twiggs, she explains, just dropped her first single—“her hyperpop sound is completely electric, I’m obsessed.” Rihanna is “obviously one of the coolest people to ever exist,” and “Disturbia” has been in rotation for five years without losing its charge. And “Sober” by Lorde? “One of the best songs ever made. It makes you feel like you’re floating.” She delivers all of this like she’s simply discussing music, which she is.

I ask what would inspire something, if someone wanted to get her attention through music alone. She doesn’t hesitate—this is her territory, and she’s been waiting. “Right now? ‘Heaven Sent’ by Esthero, ‘Bleed’ by Malcolm Todd and Omar Apollo, and ‘Gloom’ by Djo.” She gestures toward the vinyls on her wall, the Fleetwood Mac and the Lorde, the Wings and the massive Olivia Rodrigo poster watching over everything. “They hit so hard and move with such a pulsing beat that feels addictive. But honestly, you could also play anything by Lizzy McAlpine, Etta James, Oasis, or Pet Shop Boys right now and it’d be all over.” She ticks off these names—a folk singer, a jazz legend, Britpop royalty, synth-pop icons—like they all belong in the same sentence, because to her, apparently, they do. “I’m in a really weird place recently in terms of what I’m listening to, but I absolutely love it because it’s all over the place in the best way and I feel like I’m feeling every emotion all at once.”

This is, perhaps, the most sixteen-year-old sentence ever spoken—the glorious overshare of someone who hasn’t yet learned to be embarrassed by their own intensity. I mean it as a compliment.

The eclectic taste makes more sense when she talks about growing up. She’s the youngest of two, her brother Andrew seven years older, and the family was, by her account, relentlessly close—movies together, beaches, musicals, car rides soundtracked by her dad’s devotion to The Kinks and Roxy Music and The Band. “Growing up was a beautiful time for me, and I owe it all to my family,” she says, with the kind of earnestness that would sound saccharine from anyone more guarded. She was an outgoing kid, the type who did everything: soccer, basketball, singing, dancing, acting, photography lessons. The pandemic hit when she was in fifth grade and made connection harder, sent her inward—but it also gave her the white space to dive headfirst into songwriting. Some people got fucking sourdough starters out of lockdown. Ava got a career.

She reaches over to her laptop and skips back to an earlier scene in the movie—Barry Egan on the phone, desperate and strange—and this somehow reminds her of the concert that changed everything. “I’d never even heard of Taylor Swift until my mom’s friend got me tickets to the reputation tour for my birthday,” she says, a sentence that will make every millennial reading this feel approximately one thousand years old. “She was the first person who made me realize being on stage and singing could connect with so many people and make them feel so deeply through her lyrics.” She was just a kid, watching a stadium full of people lose their minds, and something clicked. Later, Norman Fucking Rockwell! by Lana Del Rey cracked open another door—“she showed me a new sound that I’d never truly heard before, and it was the first genre of music that I wanted to explore and create myself.” Taylor gave her the dream. Lana gave her the aesthetic. The messy room and the Saturday school and the attic door in the ceiling—those she came up with on her own.

There’s a generational thing happening here, and Ava knows it even if she’s still a little timid in discussing it —the way her peers refuse to separate the personal from the political, the way a pop song can be both a bop and a statement. Young female artists are increasingly expected to have opinions, to use their platforms, to stand for something beyond the music itself. When I ask where she falls on that spectrum, she straightens up a little, the theater kid in her recognizing a moment that calls for sincerity. “I want equality, inclusion, and safety for every person,” she says, “and for every group of people, whether it’s based on orientation, ethnicity, or culture, to feel like they have a place in the world and won’t be judged or hurt for expressing themselves.” It’s the kind of answer that could sound rehearsed from someone more polished, but from Ava it lands as genuine—a sixteen-year-old who has thought about this, who means it, who hasn’t yet had to defend it in a hostile interview. “Art is one of the most powerful ways to combat hatred, oppression, and discontent,” she continues, “so giving people space to express those emotions and spur action are goals I have as an artist.” Her music, she admits, is still mostly introspective—boys and feelings and the chaos of her own head. But she wants to go bigger. “Part of being an artist is using your voice for change.”

Which raises the question: as she gets louder, what kind of power is she most interested in claiming? Creative, political, economic—there are a lot of doors that open when you start filling rooms. She doesn’t hesitate. “Creative power, over anything else.” She’s leaning forward now, animated in a way she wasn’t when we were talking about prom dates. “I want to find out far more about my personal sound and style, and truly delve into that further. I want to explore my musical expression and feel more confident in who I am as a musician and singer.” She talks about wanting to perform more, to develop stage presence, to get comfortable in her own skin as an artist—not just the girl in the bedroom with the attic door, but the version of herself that stands in front of people and means it. “I think all my new music really does show this progression,” she says. “It’s helped me step more into myself as a person in my life, so I’m very proud of what I’m making now.” She grins, the swagger flickering back. “And I can’t wait for all that’s next.”

It’s getting late. The iced tea is mostly ice now, the lemon wedge beached on the side of the cup. Punch Drunk Love is winding toward its ending, the one where the weird guy gets the girl and everything works out in that specific Paul Thomas Anderson way where “works out” still feels precarious and hard-won. I ask Ava to fast-forward—not the movie, but her life. It’s 2050. She’s coming off her version of the Eras Tour. She’s thinking about retiring to a tropical island. What does she want people to say her music did?

She doesn’t hesitate, which is rare for someone who has already confessed to being “the most indecisive person ever.” “I just want people to say that my music helped them feel more comfortable and confident in their lives by seeing their experiences, flaws, emotions, and strengths displayed in my lyrics. I want people to enjoy my music fully.” She’s looking at the Olivia Rodrigo poster now, the photos of friends, the vinyls, the whole bright mess of her room. “I hope my legacy is that I made people happy, and gave people something that they loved and cared about. That’s all I really want, and that would make me feel content with my life as a whole.”

She says this with the certainty of someone who hasn’t yet learned that wanting to make people happy is both the simplest and most complicated ambition there is. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s the whole hot mess philosophy in miniature: you don’t have to have it figured out. You just have to mean it.

On the screen, the credits are rolling. Ava’s room is still small, still bright, still a beautiful disaster of vinyls and photos and evidence of a life being lived at full volume, consequences be damned. The attic door in the ceiling remains closed—for now, anyway, until she needs somewhere new to escape to, or doesn’t. Somewhere on that catastrophe of a desk, under guitar picks and half-finished lyrics and what might be an overdue library book, is probably tomorrow’s homework. She’ll get to it. Or she won’t. Her mom’s picking her up early anyway.

Either way, she’ll write a song about it, and it’ll probably be very good, and she’ll test it in the car on the way to the dentist, of all places, because that’s her life now: six days of classes and theater rehearsals and the gigs, and a ceiling door that goes nowhere and everywhere, and an iced tea addiction she has no intention of kicking, and a single called “Hot Mess” that is—unfortunately, fortunately, and completely on purpose—truth in advertising.

She’s a hot mess, and she knows it. And she’s making it work.