It’s hard to maintain a positive attitude in These Times, but Valerie June is determined to do so — and she hopes her music can be a beacon of joy for her listeners.
“I’ve examined it over the years … what does [positivity] mean in a dark world, or in dark times in your life when you feel like you failed or like you’ve lost or like things aren’t going your way?” June, 43, exclusively told Us Weekly while discussing her new album. “I ask myself, ‘Well, how could I still have joy in that time?’ And I go back to the ancestors and being a Black American from the South. My ancestors worked the fields and they were enslaved and they understood hard times. I have been so lucky in my lifetime — and most of us in America — that we don’t see those hard times, because so many people believed in the joy of those that were being born and the future.”
It’s gratitude for that luck, she explained, that keeps her going.
“We gotta keep believing in the joy, because that’s what they did,” she said. “And that’s why I’m sitting here, a free woman able to write songs all day long and get in the bathtub and play with a rubber ducky if I want. I ain’t gotta do nothing but enjoy what they have paved the way for me. … That’s where we find the joy in the dark times, is when we look through the history of humanity and we see, ‘Hey, we’ve made it.’ We’ve made it, we’ve made it, we’ve made it, we’ve made it, and we’re gonna keep on making it as long as we keep the light on in our hearts.”
From its first minute, June’s new album, Owls, Omens, and Oracles, is an exercise in finding happiness. The opening track — appropriately titled “Joy, Joy!” — begins with the lyrics, “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.” The song then builds to a buoyant explosion of drums and guitar that’s impossible not to bop along with, anchored by June’s inimitable Tennessee twang.
The tune is almost a mission statement for the rest of the album, which includes collaborations with M. Ward and the Blind Boys of Alabama. “All I Really Wanna Do” recalls the doo-wop sounds of ’60s girl groups, while “Sweet Things Just for You” is a exuberant love song about being so into someone you’d “swim more than a thousand seas” to see them.
June notes that she still has her bad days, but she approaches life — as well as music — with a determination to center the good.
“It’s taken me years to understand it,” she told Us. “I’ll be on the floor in my own dark depression and be like, ‘What the heck? I’m supposed to find some light and feel some joy? F*** that. But now I get it. … It’s not necessarily that you are running around with a big smile on your face all the time. It’s like a resolve, it’s like a trust.”
She went into the studio to begin recording the album last July, but some of the songs on it have been floating around in one form or another for more than 20 years. “My Life Is a Country Song,” for example, is “so old,” but she finally decided to record it, knowing that she might decide to alter something about it in the future.
“There’s many different ways for a song to live. It’s not permanent like a tattoo,” she explained. “You can always change a lyric or add a horn or play it without instrumentation. [There are] many different ways of it existing, so I went ahead and put it out.”
June is hesitant to pick a favorite track on the album — “the songs get jealous of each other” — but she there’s a few she “can’t wait” to play live, including the rocker “Endless Tree.”
“I’m feeling all kinds of Iggy Pop vibes on this s***,” she teased. “It’s got so much energy, and I just wanna get on stage and sing it. I just wanna feel every single lyric, especially in this time with everything going on politically across the globe and the polycrisis we have with climate change and all the things coming together all at once that we’re really gonna have to start to face. I’m like, ‘OK, there is kind of an anthem for this now where it’s like, we gotta be ready to learn how to disagree with each other and still live on this Earth together and create a harmonious existence with one another.’ That is what we have to do. And if you need a song for it, then I wrote it.”
Owls, Omens, and Oracles is out now.
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