Valerie June’s unique and soulful voice should come with a disclaimer: Comparison is the thief of joy.
It is certainly understandable why folks attempt to characterize Ms. June’s sound, closing their eyes and murmuring the names of eclectic Black female artists like Macy Gray and Erykah Badu. Carrying a tune is one thing, but how an artist carries it is something else entirely. There’s a way that Ms. June’s music resonates, like a hummingbird’s wings. It’s why christenings from and collaborations with soul music icons like Mavis Staples, Carla Thomas, and Bob Dylan only scratch the surface of Ms. June’s story.
The Monitor spoke with the musician ahead of the April 11 release of her latest album, “Owls, Omens, and Oracles.” It features an effervescent single, the aptly named “Joy, Joy!” and guest artists that include Norah Jones and the Blind Boys of Alabama. Instead of asking whom she sounds like, it felt more apropos to ask the earthy songstress how she makes such important healing music.
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With the arrival of Valerie June’s latest album comes a chance for the singer to reflect on her artistic journey – and how music fuels her, and the world.
“It is refreshing to start in a new way,” Ms. June acknowledges in a video call. “When I think about the soul, and being a worker in the realm of soul music … I just think about how it goes beyond just our personal existence, how it extends itself to the entire world, and how it is really a music to re-center people to their good side.”
Ms. June named the alliterative album “Owls, Omens, and Oracles” for various reasons – the fowl component due to the nocturnal bird’s prowess in seeing through darkness. She is promoting the project with chops worthy of a second-generation music producer, having recently finished a group of songs on CBS’ “Saturday Sessions.”
Her sixth studio album is “her most gently ambitious and dazzlingly diverse” to date, writes Stephen Deusner in a review in Uncut magazine. “For Valerie June, roots music is never static, but a genre that can be stretched to cover any idea that crosses her mind. Her latest might be her best demonstration yet of that principle.”
The singer-songwriter was made and molded by music. She was born Valerie June Hockett in Jackson, Tennessee, to “strict Christian parents” who were remarkably industrious.
“There are five kids in our family, and our parents worked us. … When we weren’t in school, we were working,” she says. “My father had a construction company and a music promotion company, and we worked in both of the businesses. I was on the side of music promotion, and as a kid, we would go to radio stations and talk about the shows.”
Honed by radio feedback and gospel music, Ms. Jones’ humming soon made her a marquee name. She built a regional following down the Mississippi River and throughout the deltas – in Arkansas and her native Tennessee. It happened at a frenetic pace, the day jobs and the side music gigs. And then it all came to a crashing halt.
“I went to work at one of my jobs one day, and my boss [said], ‘Oh, you don’t look good! How are you feeling?’ She closed the shop, took me to the emergency clinic,” Ms. June says.
Ms. June, who is admittedly “not a particularly religious person,” found herself confronting a challenging diagnosis.
“I waited in the [emergency room] for a while, and I said, ‘Man, I can’t die. I haven’t made a record. I haven’t done anything I wanna do. I’m just working on getting there,’” she says. “I was making conversation with the other side and said, ‘Y’all let me stick around. I’m gonna do what I need to do here.’”
That sense of longing – and belonging – informed Ms. June’s earlier music. The opening stanza of “Astral Plane,” originally written in 2014 and later included on her 2017 album “The Order of Time,” reads as such: “Is there a light you have inside you? / Can’t touch / A looking glass can only show you so much / Follow the signs slowly but steady / Don’t rush / The day will come when you are ready / Just trust.”
“I had a lot of dark songs before I started to work with people like Mavis and Carla and Booker T. [Jones], songs that were just about loss and pain and tragedy,” Ms. June says. “Mavis said that Pops [Staples] told her that she can sing anyone else’s songs, but they [must] have a positive message, because their purpose was to lift people up.
“She asked me for some songs, and I only had two positive songs out of 150,” she adds. “She chose one of the songs, and the Blind Boys of Alabama chose the other one. After that, the universe just started sending me songs with positive messages.”
The opening stanza to “Joy, Joy!” answers “Astral Plane” in kind, and she admits the two records are “sister songs”: “There is a light you can see / That is wanting to be free / A hidden light deep inside / Learn to trust your spirit guide / There is a light you can find / If you stop to take the time / Know when it’s right, rise and shine / The seas will part, the stars align.”
She lives between Tennessee and New York, a reflection on great migrations and her own personal journey. She is simultaneously organic and modernized, both city and country mouse. She sees omens whenever she passes the name “Emerson,” which was her late father’s name, and she herself has become an oracle, making a path for the next generation like her ancestors did for her.
“When I think about oracles … I think about what the Indigenous elders always say, and that is to think about our actions, everything from brushing our teeth to taking out the trash to going to the post office,” she says. “Think about it and how it will affect people seven generations from now. If we’re thinking that way, then we know that we are the ancestors in the making.”
