Not fitting a mold, she makes her own
Valerie June’s contemplative themes manifest in a mix of musical styles on new album ‘The Order of Time’
Valerie June grew up in the little Tennessee town of Humboldt, which falls roughly between the country-music hub of Nashville and the blues and soul hub of Memphis.
As is often the case for musicians from the South, the church played significantly into her musical education. And her hometown isn’t too far removed from northern Mississippi, where a droning style of blues purred after hours at little juke joints. Her father was also a concert promoter, who put on shows by artists including Bobby Womack and Prince.
So all manner of music flowed like tributaries into June’s life.
To listen to “The Order of Time,” her mesmerizing new album, is to hear those different sorts of music breathed in as disparate elements and breathed back out as some other thing. Sometimes June reminds of Dolly Parton, other times Erykah Badu. She possesses an ability to speak the familiar with a new dialect.
“I always try to just serve the song,” says June, who will play the Heights Theater on Wednesday evening. “Try to honor what a song is trying to do, not to push them in any direction. I just love instruments, and I feel like they get stamped and labeled too often. Why does a trumpet have to be only in jazz? Why does the banjo have to just be bluegrass? I don’t hear them that way as a songwriter. I don’t want them to feel like they’re traditional colors placed in a traditional way on a canvas.”
Little elements from various traditions peek through on “The Order of Time” — slowly swelling grooves that echo blues great Junior Kimbrough inform a few tracks — but June’s music isn’t easily cornered. She refers to “sister songs,” styles of similar music separated by thousands of miles — like the sounds of northern Mississippi and northern Africa.
The album’s varied sound fits its lyrics. June titled her previous record “Pushing Against a Stone.” Taken together, the two album titles suggest an artist deeply contemplative about the passing of time. Where “Stone” suggests a linear struggle, “The Order of Time” skips around from points in a lifetime based on memories.
“We don’t really get much time on this planet,” she says. “So I find myself thinking about time a lot. Why is this or that so important? Why do we perceive things the way we perceive them?”
June mostly dusted off older songs for the album, some of them more than 10 years old. “Every song is living,” she says. “A song may be in a different place today than it was 10 years ago. They grow and change like we do with time and different instrumentation.”
Her father’s death made some themes resonate anew. “Long Lonely Road” suggests we don’t cut our own paths through the wilderness.
“I’ve been trying to really sit with this idea about how much of a person’s fortune in life is their own,” she says. “And how much is given from other people’s lives. I’m constantly questioning these things. Not about God but about the spirit, about beings, how we get here. How we fit and how we don’t. My journal is filled with that kind of stuff since I lost my father. There are no answers, but it feels good to think about it.”
So her album is informed by reverence and restlessness. Opener “Long Lonely Road” sounds like a succinct autobiography, touching on her youth and a poor family’s struggle and the decision to trade a home in Tennessee for one in New York. “Surely there’ll be a way to wait for the brighter days,” she sings.
June’s actual story includes a stop in Memphis between Humboldt and New York. She moved there at 18 and started performing around the city and releasing a few albums independently.
She got to New York in 2011 and set about making “Pushin’ Against a Stone,” with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach producing. That album began to open doors for June, who drew attention for her sound of American music that didn’t adhere to radio-genre formats. With a headdress of snakelike dreadlocks, she cut a striking figure, but June could also hush a crowd with just a banjo and her voice, itself snaky and soulful, both Southern and spacey.
After four years of pushing “Stone,” June, 35, offers “The Order of Time,” which isn’t a concept album per se. But the search for brighter days in the opening song begins a journey of sorts. The brighter days don’t come fast, as the songs are populated with characters in varying states of unease and conflict.
But June holds the celebration ’til the end. “Got Soul” feels like an affirmation after struggle. True to her musical spirit, the song pairs fiddle and banjo with joyous blasts of brass. Lyrically, too, it speaks to finding some comfort in the world. “I could sing you a country tune,” June sings. She also offers: “I could play you the blues to help carry the load while you’re paying your dues.”
But June in the refrain declares her spirit to be bigger than established forms.
“I got soul,” she sings. “Yeah, I got sweet soul.”
Then she says it again for emphasis: “Soul.”