Pinwheel Valley’s “Going Away” Is a Dream You Don’t Want to Wake Up From

The Jordanian-Canadian artist (formerly known as KAIS) isn’t just making music, he’s building entire emotional ecosystems.

“Going Away” by Pinwheel Valley is a slow-burning, gut-wrenching, soul-surrendering kind of indie song. Co-written with Berlin-based guitarist and composer Tal Arditi, it’s not some overproduced radio bait. It’s vulnerable and real.

The song moves like a spiritual journey, starting in the dark, tangled corners of self-doubt and societal pressure, then gradually moving toward something softer, freer, more open. Arditi’s guitar work ripples with warmth and precision, while Qais’s voice carries a fragile strength that sounds like it’s lived a thousand lifetimes. Together, they build a soundscape that’s cinematic without being over-the-top, intimate without feeling small.

“Going Away” is about letting go, not just of someone else, but of everything you thought you had to be. It’s about peeling back the noise, the ego, the weight of performance, and finding something quieter and truer underneath. 

“Collaboration is super important in music. If you’re ever stuck in writer’s block, try vibing with someone. It might just pull you back into creative momentum.” – Pinwheel Valley

There’s no need to box this into a playlist category. It’s a song for when you need to fall apart just a little, or maybe finally start putting yourself back together. 

“Going Away” feels incredibly personal and introspective. What inner shift or experience sparked the writing of this song, and how did the collaboration with Tal Arditi shape its emotional arc?

Well, I wrote the piano melody first, that’s what sparked the rest of the song's inspiration. As a co-writer, Tal managed to create pretty solid guitar parts and percussive elements that perfectly accompanied the shift in the piano tempo and time signature halfway through the song. He seemed so enmeshed in the piano melody that he also sent me a concept for a vocal topline. I usually like working on my own vocals, but I quite liked the melodic direction, so I managed to create the lyrical sphere from it.

I think the inner shift in the creative process that sparked the writing of this song was about feeling like an absolute nobody in the music industry. It's easy to feel that way when you’re blindsided with failure after failure. Very few really acknowledge the art you make, so lyrically, this is kind of where Tal and I met at a crossroads. There was an unspoken understanding - “This feeling of guarding someone who disappears.” The lyrical arc follows the trajectory of the hero/adventurer who is first weighed down by

doubt and fear and has to reach a place of surrender and openness, where there is

freedom. The kind of freedom where the soul sheds its burdens and expands beyond

the limits imposed by the expectations of the world. You blend genres like indie soul, folktronica, and neoclassical so seamlessly. How do you approach genre when creating? Do you follow feeling and instrumentation, or is it something more instinctual?

It always depends on where the song starts. While I sit with a piano or guitar, I can formulate a full structure, melodically and vocally, in a couple of sittings, and I allow the lyrics to follow thereon. Usually, I have a solid vision for how the song will turn out from the moment of writing, and I can navigate the imaginary terrain of what the other instruments will do. The important thing is that I’ve become more fluent in listening to what the song needs and where it wants to go. I don’t like forcing the writing process. It tells me what it wants. So yes, you could say there’s an instinctual or intuitive force behind it all. With ‘Going Away,’ there was a different kind of calling. I was at a bit of a spiritual impasse, and this song said to me, ‘You need to work on this track with someone else’, and that’s where I reached out to Tal, who was more than happy to take it on. Felt like some kind of serendipity.

There’s a strong theme of surrender and release in this track. What does ‘letting go’ look like for you creatively, and how do you know when a song is truly finished?

‘Letting go’ is not being weighed down by the expectations of society. That means the voice of parents, family, friends, and even your followers. People who habitually expect you to be one thing or another because those things always fit the familiar mold of success for them. I think that’s what letting go means. It’s to bravely follow your inner compass, even if it leads you across ‘the sea.’

You've performed across cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Seattle, and now create from a Mediterranean island. How has your physical and cultural environment influenced your sound and process?

I believe every place you travel to and build a foundation from has a soundscape that you unconsciously absorb and transmute into your own creativity. As your skillset grows, so does the ability to listen to those soundscapes more carefully and turn them into what you can call your ‘signature art/sound/style.’ But for those who feel they’ve never had a chance to really travel, know that that place could be anything... It doesn’t necessarily have to be a city. It could be a painting, a poem, or your own child’s voice.

Influence is everywhere, and it’s what speaks to your heart the most that eventually translates into your art. And no, you don’t have to sound like Coldplay if you live in London, or Nickelback if you live in Vancouver, or Fairuz if you live in Beirut. I believe in letting go of cliches and creating from the heart.

You mentioned how collaboration can pull you out of writer’s block. What advice would you give to artists struggling to reconnect with their creativity or voice right now?

I think we live in pretty difficult times. There are moral atrocities happening to us

everywhere we turn. And social media is not helping us quiet our minds. So right now

we’re at a major spiritual roadblock. How can we create art from a place of such intense

trauma? I think that while that’s happening, artists need to remember that art has to come from the embers of the heart… When the heart feels like it's collapsing, one has to remember that that sometimes is where the greatest and most profound inspiration comes from. There’s a track by Jon Hopkins, Ram Dass, and East Forest that I recommend when you’re feeling out of alignment with your voice. It’s called ‘Sit Around the Fire. I promise you it has healing powers. When you’re feeling lost or broken, take a couple of minutes out of your day to listen to it. Let it be followed by some of the other Jon Hopkins work as well, like ‘Music for Psychedelic Therapy’.