By Jim Morrison
Valerie June recorded her latest set of originals, “The Moon and the Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers,” before the pandemic. When the lockdown descended, her label delayed its debut.
As a performer who quipped that she only returned to her Brooklyn apartment long enough to wash her clothes and head back onto the road, June suddenly was anchored. She returned to her roots, spending time in her Tennessee childhood home, where her mother still lived. There she grounded herself in the Earth, getting on her knees in her vegetable garden, visiting the frogs, snakes, and lizards out behind the house, and sitting quietly taking in the blue heron that made a pilgrimage.
“I really feel guilty sometimes saying this, but I didn’t realize that I needed to be home,” she says in a phone call before hopping on a plane to Italy for pleasure, not business. “I really felt like in the pandemic that I needed to just be in touch with the earth and I needed to be planting things and growing things and watching the cycles of the season. So there really was a time for me to stop and rejuvenate and realize that I can slow down. I don’t have to work like a crazy woman.”
June will be working in Norfolk on June 7 when she plays in The Perry Pavilion downtown as part of the Virginia Arts Festival’s collaboration with North Shore Point House Concerts.
She grew up in a small Tennessee town, learning to sing in church by studying the voices of the congregation. Through her father, a part-time promoter of gospel singers and touring stars like Bobby Womack and Prince, she got a glimpse of the secular side of music. Moving to Memphis opened another gusher of influence. “You know, you can’t really grow up on planet Earth and not be influenced by the music made in Memphis,” she says.
Throughout the pandemic, music was more than art. It was a guide, a balm, a bridge between communities. “I realized that art and creativity are ultimately a prescription for people,” she says. Hearing Sam Cooke sing “A Change is Gonna Come” helped her through that challenging time. Hearing Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” provided a reminder about how to deal kindly with the mail carrier or the grocery store clerk or other essential workers.
True to her latest album’s title, she penned her prescriptions — what each song meant to her — as a prologue to the lyrics in the liner notes. For “You and I,” about a relationship without regret but on unsure footing, she wrote “Impermanence+Being Present+Interconnectivity. For “Smile,” about dusting yourself off and getting back up, she said “Transcendence+Hope/Possibilities+Rebirth/Growth.” For “Call Me A Fool,” about blind love, she wrote” “Beginning/The Leap+Fear of Failure+Confidence.”
Listeners bring their interpretation. One couple asked her to sing a little of “Call Me A Fool” so they could play it at their wedding. “I was thinking, hmm, that’s interesting,” she says in her Tennessee twang, laughing, something she does throughout the interview. ” I don’t know if I would have that song at my wedding.”
June says she has a catalog of 150 songs. The ones that spoke to her for this album tended towards looking inward. Digging in the dirt, as it does, spawned introspection about the broader possibilities of art in a time of fear and division. Music, art, sculpture, and dance, she says, create an opportunity for people with different beliefs to get together. “You’re all there together as one enjoying something,” June added. “That is a prescription to me. That is, that’s what keeps us in a place of love and society. And I think we need more of it.”
Her prescriptions for albums change with the times. She’s not chained to a genre or a sound, calling her style “organic moonshine roots music.” Critics have called her rural and cosmopolitan, mystical and down-to-earth. Her songs are delivered in a nasal twang that’s spellbinding and unique. She slips in and out of soul, country, folk, jazz, bluegrass, and blues.
“Shakedown” on her second album evokes Stonesy blues. “Astral Plane” on that disc veers towards Van Morrison. “Workin’ Woman “Blues” on her 2013 debut, “Pushin’ Against a Stone” is stone-cold country blues. “Call Me a Fool” on “The Moon and Stars” could perfectly fit any Sixties Stax album.
Her choice of producers reveals her desire to explore. She’s worked with Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show, Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys (he brought in Jimbo Mathus of Squirrel Nut Zippers and North Mississippi guitar star Eric Deaton), and most recently with Jack Splash, a Grammy-winning Los Angeles producer who has worked with Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys, Jennifer Hudson, and Anthony Hamilton.
“I think every record I do is just going to be a different record than the record before,” June says. “We are living beings and we’re growing and changing.”
Growing and changing means she dives into other outlets. “I’m an exploratory artist,” she says. “I like to write books and poetry and do art and illustrations and so many different styles, I love fashion and sewing and creating outfits and all kinds of styling. I don’t really think that my creativity must have bounds. I want to use my creativity to do what feels right to me in the moment. That’s kind of how the records happen.”
Taking time off was new. Taking time off from listening to music was not. “I experience great periods of time where I don’t listen to anything,” she adds. “I just listen to the world and go into silence. So I’m in a silent place right now. And I’m looking forward to coming out of it. ”
Her albums have universally won over critics during the past decade. Rolling Stone listed her second album, “The Order of Time” as one of the best 50 of 2017 citing “her handsomely idiosyncratic brand of Americana, steeped deep in electric blues and old-time folk, gilded in country twang and gospel yearning….a blend of spacey hippie soul, blues and folk with June’s pinched, modern-Appalachian voice at the center”
“Call Me A Fool” from her latest was nominated for Best American Roots Song for this year’s Grammy Awards.
For “The Moon and Stars,” Splash brought in Lester Snell, a string arranger from the Stax Records studio band, and a collaborator with Isaac Hayes back then. Another Stax connection came from Carla Thomas, who had a hit with “B-A-B-Y” and recorded with Otis Redding and her father, Rufus. She sings on “Call Me a Fool.”
Thomas is just one of the soul legends who have worked with June. Booker T. Jones and Mavis Staples have also made cameos on past songs.
“Carla is truly my fairy godmother. She is such a positive energy. And I can say the same for Booker T. and Mavis Staples,” she says. “I feel like we are all one age, but they are my elders. And I’m walking in their footsteps.”
While the pandemic delayed the release of “The Moon and Stars,” it gave birth to another disc, “Under Cover.” The collection features a typical range of choices including Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon,” David Rawlings and Gillian Welch’s “Look at Miss Ohio,” Nick Cave’s “Into My Arms” and Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You.” The latter has more than 2.7 million views on Youtube.
“I’m so surprised,” she says. “I don’t really cover songs, right? We were bored during the pandemic. Nobody was working and so I was like, let’s just go in and have some fun and record songs that we love.”
She sent it to her label, which loved it, but she told them she didn’t want to do any press. Just keep it quiet. “And it turns out, this is one of my biggest releases,” she says. “It actually has gotten more listeners than anything I’ve done. And I’m like, oh my god, well, maybe I need to quit writing songs and just cover them.”
With that, she laughs and it’s clear there’s no chance she will become a cover artist.
The songs call. In Tennessee during her days in the garden and her walks out back, she heard them. She heard a song that became the coda for “The Moon and Stars,” an album she’d finished.
They were the sounds of the birds. She recorded them. Splash added keyboards, flutes, and the soothing sounds of a Tibetan singing bowl to create “Starlight Ethereal Silence,” the album’s coda.
Her prescription for the song: “Mindfulness+Transformation+Awakening.”
WANT TO GO?
Valerie June
Presented by Virginia Arts Festival
June 7
Perry Pavilion
