THE TIME-WARPED CHARM OF VALERIE JUNE

‘Her new album The Moon and Stars’ sounds just right in 2021

Afire crackled in a cast-iron stove behind Valerie June. She had a bright carnation in her abundant dreadlocks, a mug of tea, a banjo by her side and an Etta James album propped against an amplifier as she chatted via video about her new album, The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers. She had all but finished the music last January, after two years of onand-off recording, and was expecting at first to release it in 2020. But her label, Fantasy, convinced her that would be a “bad idea,” she said with a laugh. Now the 39-yearold musician was ensconced at an Airbnb rental house in upstate New York, where she could make music at any time without disturbing the neighbours at her Brooklyn apartment. “It feels so strange,” she said. “It just feels so different to not travel. I value just being alone, but this is way too much.” Although The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, due March 12, arrives in a different era than the one it was made in, it sounds unexpectedly timely. Even before the isolation of the past year, Valerie June’s artistic intuition had led her toward thoughts of stillness, meditation and inwardness. She also completed a book that is due in April under her full name, Valerie June Hockett: Maps for the Modern World (Andrews McMeel), a collection of poems, drawings and homilies about consciousness and mindfulness, like Visualization. Valerie June has built a devoted following by ignoring expectations. She is simultaneously rural and cosmopolitan, historically minded and contemporary, idiosyncratic and fashionable, mystical and down-to-earth. She calls her style “organic moonshine roots music.” Her voice has a wayward twang and a sly finesse, while her music wanders amid soul, country, folk, jazz and blues — along with nods, on the new album, to hip-hop and Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat. “Not every song that I write fits a certain genre,” she said. “Songs are teachers; they’re like bosses, basically. They’re like, ‘This is what we want.’ They have lives and feelings and potentials and desires and dreams. And I have to be the one who’s listening to them and telling whoever it is what I hear that they want.” Valerie June was born in Jackson, Tennessee, and grew up in nearby Humboldt. She learnt to sing from all the voices around her at church services while she was exposed to the secular music business through her father, a part-time concert promoter. Her reputation spread fast among musicians. She sang featured backup vocals with country singer Eric Church, rapper John FortE and songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello; she released her own recordings, including a bluegrassy EP, Valerie June and the Tennessee Express. Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys was a coproducer for her 2013 debut album, Pushin’ Against a Stone. That album and The Order of Time from 2017 had the naturalistic sound of musicians playing together in real time. But for The Moon and Stars, Valerie June decided to incorporate some studio time-warping. She wrote new material and dug into a backlog she estimates at 150 songs; one, the fragile Fallin’, dates back to the early 2000s. And with her co-producer Jack Splash, she layered live band recordings with low-fi demos. Splash and her worked on the songs at home and saved up material until they were ready to gather at studio sessions. Those tended to be scheduled on nights with a full moon, by “absolute cosmic coincidence,” said Splash. “It was very beautiful, though. We felt like the sky was smiling down on us.”