The band quickly recorded the album without their record label knowing about it, since it fell outside of the terms of their contract at that time.[2] In an interview with the Ryan Adams-Whiskeytown fan website AnsweringBell.com, Whiskeytown drummer Skillet Gilmore confirmed this.[3]
Music journalist David Menconi calls Forever Valentine "an interesting yet unfocused record consisting of eleven quite good but quite different songs", citing it as "one of the leading entries in Ryan's catalog of 'lost' albums";[4] while Steven Hyden of Grantland says that it "ranks with Adams’s best Whiskeytown work".[5]