Shooting for the moon

“The full moon was with us almost every recording session we did!” June beams, her voice thick and honeyed, calling to mind the country roads and downtown music bars of her native state of Tennessee. “On our very last day of recording, I think the moon started smiling back at us. I went outside and I was doing my moon ritual, looking up, and there were three shooting stars. She gave me a nice treat at the end: it was like confetti, with those stars.” That’s why the night sky was her first prescription for all the dreamers.

For the last fifteen years, Valerie June’s country-indebted sound has proven to be a gentle balm against the turbulence of our everyday lives. Her voice, unmistakable and an instrument prone to bouts of joy and vulnerability like any other, seems to defy anything so fickle as a trend, instead standing as timeless and resolute – something we can depend on. Call it what you want, but after a year of upheaval in a global pandemic, the arrival of her third album feels like a stroke of divine intervention. There couldn’t be better timing.

“The quarantine helped me realise what the prescriptions were for the songs,” says June. She, like all of us, suddenly had time for quiet, for self-reflection, which her life up until that point had rarely afforded her. “There was a song for courage; there was a song for believing; there was something for the moments where you need stillness in your life.” She brings up the record’s closing track, “Starlight Ethereal Silence”: “That’s just me going out during the quarantine days and recording birdsong in my backyard in Tennessee. We need to have those moments, and quarantine kind of forced it on us. It forced all of it.”

She found herself turning to the artists and records that had always helped her through the difficult times. “I started thinking about their music as different prescriptions to get me through the crazy days,” she explains, her southern lilt carrying a musicality equal to her singing. “And I was just like, ‘Well, these are my prescriptions for people! These are my little gifts to help lift people up and give them joy, as other artists have done for me. I want to do it for y’all!”

Even though The Moon and Stars... was a record that was drawn together in a year, some of the songs, in fact, had been fifteen years in the making. Her life was very different back then – she had just started “pushing against the stone”, the namesake of her first record as a signed artist, to create the life that she had always dreamed of. “I was very scared then,” she remembers. “And I’ve been scared pretty much every day.” Until she was signed, she was living hand-to-mouth from tip jars, selling her self-recorded, bootleg CDs out the back of her car. “I’ve learned how to channel that fear now,” she says. “But when I first started, fear was something I just had to push through.”

June’s three records act as a trilogy: the telling of her dream in three acts. The Order of Time, her second album of electric blues, country tradition and gentle Americana, won the admiration of the genre’s progenitor, Bob Dylan, and was a reflection on every obstacle she had overcome to get to that moment. She shares, “On that record, I realised that you can’t rush your dreams – dreams happen in their own time.” It was a decade of sacrifice and uncertainty before Pushing Against the Stone came to be. “It’s the same with everything,” June continues. “You can’t force a flower to open or make a shooting star cross the sky when you walk outside. Everything happens in its own time. Whenever people think of dreams, you think of something soft and fluffy, but dreams take work – they’re not easy to see as a reality in your life.”

Now that June has manifested the life she had always dreamed of, this record, The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers asks, ‘What does it look like inside?” Now, she has the answer: “I started seeing all of these gifts that I’ve been blessed with in my life. I’ve been blessed with the world, with people – everybody, from the musicians I know, admire and work with – there are so many things, and it was huge.”

"Bullshit happens - but I’m not gonna let that turn me into a dark person! I’m gonna use the blues, instead of living it. I’m gonna use it to create something new.”

Guided by the moon and the stars her whole life, reassured by these heavenly bodies, June is sure, now, that our dreams are something bigger than all of us. “What’s important is that we keep our goal on the moon and stars, and we keep our hearts open, which is hard to do, because as you get older, you stack up a whole pile of heartbreaks… that guy who treated you terrible, or this one, or that one, or whatever – I got a couple of divorces myself – and you just want to close your heart. But instead of doing that, you gotta look at the world and be like, ‘I know, I know - bullshit happens. But I’m not gonna let that turn me into a dark person! I’m gonna use the blues, instead of living it. I’m gonna use it to create something new.”

If our dreams are far bigger than ourselves, then The Moon and Stars... is bigger than Valerie June. It’s a maelstrom of musicians, genres and influences from music and beyond. When asked about her all-you-can-eat appetite for the record, she says, “I don’t really feel like it was a choice. I knew that I wanted the record to be multi-dimensional and multi-genre.” It’s a reflection of our own appetite for music, she says, which is just as limitless. “It’s like cooking: you’re not just gonna cook with salt – I want all the spices!” June laughs. “I guess I could say that I use genre like a spice, versus making genre the definitive point of the song. You know, I’m not gonna say, ‘This is a country song’ – I’m gonna say, ‘Well, it’s got a base of country, but it also has this twisted hip-hop beat and these orchestral layers of strings’, you know? I think food would be pretty bland if we only stuck to one spice.”

The collaborator who would be her right-hand man in achieving this vision was producer, composer and sound engineer Jack Splash, who was the architect of Kendrick Lamar’s seminal Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, as well as material from Solange, John Legend and Alicia Keys. “He was the right fit because we could have conversations about everything from art, to poetry, to fashion to politics,” June says. “He doesn’t see the world in limited ways. I knew that because I was seeing the music like a kaleidoscope in this very genre-schizophrenic way, and he was gonna be a person who wasn’t going to try and limit that. He was brilliant at taking my voice and translating it to the correct instrument, bringing in the right musicians who were able to make that happen. He’s the wizard of this record.”

What she loves most about Jack Splash is his taste: he loves to bring together elements that shouldn’t work, and yet, ineffably do. She remembers a painting of a space suit with flowers blooming from the helmet on his wall. “His studio is just iridescent and magical. He’d already got the mood I was trying to create with the record,” she says. Splash also decked his walls with prints in homage to Black icons and innovators, from Erykah Badu to Nina Simone and Biggie. “As a Black person, sometimes it can be hard to see yourself put in that kind of positive light. Especially in the south, it can feel like people are quicker to say you’ve done something wrong rather than focusing on a beautiful thing someone contributed to the world,” says June. “I feel like we’re constantly contributing beautiful things to the world, and Jack was one of those people who celebrated that diversity. So, how do we share it? How do we see it? How do we feel when we see someone who doesn’t look like us walking down the street?” Art, for June, holds out hope for unity.

Her song, “Smile” was not only a source of personal reassurance, but also a meditation on the Black experience after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless others in 2020 alone - all at the hands of the US police force and the institutional racism endemic to the West. After listening to the speeches of John Lewis, a Civil Rights Activist who was one of the “Big Six” leaders of groups who organised the 1963 March on Washington who passed last year, the trauma her people had sustained hit home – but what June also discovered was their own remarkable resilience. “He was one of those people who had a childlike heart, even as an adult. After all that brutality, blood and broken bones… he should not have had that heart,” she sighs. “He died with the intention of, ‘Yes, we are going to change, and yes, we can’. And so I think of the song “Smile” as being about the one thing that no slave master, no pushbacks, can take from you: your smile and your inner joy. Your joy is your everything. You’ve got to have that in your spirit and protect it.”

"Music is one of those things that’s a universal language.You just pick it up, wherever you are, and you feel it.”

Across its fourteen tracks, June and Splash enlisted musicians to play a spectrum of instruments, which they have spattered across the record with Pollock-like abandon. From the saxophone and synth, to the mbira and Mellotron – Valerie June wanted it all. The core band, a collection of musicians that she had known in Brooklyn for many years, simply captured what they felt when they heard her perform it alone. But Splash helped bring those textures to new heights, bringing in a drummer and piano player from Miami who played in a church. “And dang, they just took it to church!”, June laughs. “I didn’t know they were gonna do that!”

The studio was a creative hive of musicians from across the world, bringing the meditative rhythms of percussionist Humberto Ibarra and the sweeping string arrangements of long-time David Bowie producer Tony Visconti all into one spot, committed to one record. None of them had ever met each other before, and yet, they understood each other instinctively. “Music is one of those things that’s a universal language,” says June. “You just pick it up, wherever you are, and you feel it – they all felt it. They felt it in different ways, bringing that feeling to life.”

Every song on the record was paired with a poet or a proverb. From the Persian poet Hafez and the works of thirteenth-century mystic and poet Rumi, to the contemporary observations of the natural world from the verse of Robert Frost, June has tapped into them all. Her influences are dizzying in their number. “Stardust Scattering” was inspired by the incantatory poems of Sun Ra from his book, The Measurable Equation. “Well, his poetry just blew me away,” she says. “When I started to read it, those words started to add up – he actually uses words like numbers.” She uses the way the word ‘Earth’ can be made into ‘Heart’, which then can be stripped back to the word ‘Art’, as an example of the way Sun Ra uses equations in his literature. “It adds to the chaotic nature of his music, and its otherworldliness. He talks about the world, about consciousness, Earthlings and the ways we are all connected.”

Sun Ra - much like Valerie June herself - is a dreamer. “He’s one of those people who wants to raise the energy of the earth and inspire more love, like Martin Luther King and John Lennon,” she explains. “He’s one of those people! He dresses like a magical wizard. I wanted the chorus, ‘Watch the stardust scattering’, to be like one of Sun Ra’s mantras. When I listen to it, I just close my eyes, and I feel like I’m in the middle of the room, levitating, listening and seeing all of this stardust moving around.” She pauses. “They say that we’re from stardust. That’s what Carl Sagan, one of my favourite scientists said.” June laughs, like the tinkling of a wind chime: “I’m like, ‘Well, if we’re made from stardust, then aren’t we fucking magical?”

Magic incarnate, for June, is found in Carla Thomas, the ‘Queen of Memphis Soul’ herself. “She’s a fairy godmother!” she declares. “It’s a record made for dreamers, and every dreamer’s journey has to have a fairy godmother.” On the swaying, soul-infused “Call Me a Fool”, together, June and Thomas bring a livewire vocal performance that will have you forgetting where you are, or what your name is. “We were together from 10am ‘til midnight, just hanging out like girlfriends. That was my dream come true. I just hope I can make it happen again one day - like I said, she’s a star for real.”

But when she heard Thomas’ speaking voice, June knew that there would be no one better to read for the interlude, “African Proverb”. Over mellow piano keys and the whirling sounds of the outer atmosphere, Thomas reads: “Only a fool tests the water with both feet.” Why that particular proverb? June explains, “She’s telling the dreamer, ‘Hey, you might want to be careful, because dreams are scary. Are you sure you want to follow that dream? You might get your heart broken. What happens if you fall?’ She’s kind of holding them and saying, ‘Are you sure?’ – but then, the dreamer takes the leap. And they say, ‘Yeah, I’m fucking sure. Oh, you can call me a fool. But I’ll do it. I don’t care if I fall.’” June bubbles with excitement: “Then, towards the end of “Call Me a Fool”, the fairy godmother is so happy that the dreamer did take the leap and follow in the footsteps of magical things, that she joins in and starts singing along!”

But when it came to following her own dreams, self-doubt snagged at her sleeve every step of the way. “I knew, since I was little, that my voice didn’t sound like the singers I heard on the radio,” she recalls. “I was very afraid to tell people that I wanted to be a singer – I kept that secret in my heart.” She describes her conscience, the little voice in her mind, as her own Jiminy Cricket, planting those early seeds of self-doubt. Growing up, she gained tentative confidence, stepping up to perform in front of her fourth-grade class. To her surprise, nobody left – they clapped for her, instead. When she later moved to Memphis, immersing herself in the open mic circuit, she found that her tip jar was full of dollar bills stuffed in by patrons bewitched by the unusually sweet, yet soulful cadence of her voice.

"Everywhere you go, there’s something pulling your mind elsewhere – and if we want to dream, and we want to be inspired, then we need our imagination."

Juggling three jobs, she would grind through the week to put shows together on the weekends. “But then I got sick,” she says, “And when I got sick, I had to quit my three jobs because I physically couldn’t go to work anymore – but I could play for 30 minutes at the bar. And so I learned, through a lack of options, to take the leap. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t spent all those years waiting to take it. My body, in the end, made me.”

Her life, then, began to shift. As musicians like the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach and record labels including Sunday Best started to orbit around her, her name gained momentum. “I’ve been living in a van with six dudes for a decade now,” she laughs, “And I’m like, ‘That’s the dream!”.

Telling the story of Valerie June puts you at risk of believing it was easy, that luck came like a bolt from the blue and everything simply fell into place once she had paid her dues. But what it took was hard work – that’s the lesson that was taught to her from her upbringing in Tennessee. Her father owned a construction company by day but would moonlight as a music promoter when he clocked out. June remembers hanging flowers around the town for his shows one day, and then the next staking bricks to sell from torn-down buildings the next. “I sang with my brothers and sisters,” she remembers. “It was like The Jackson 5! There was five of us kids, and we’d just get down while we were working, singing along. If we were going to our grandma’s house, or if we were going to school, our parents would yell at us because we were always singing, making up our own parts. We didn’t have instruments… I think we didn’t have them because we were always so loud that if we did, we’d have driven our parents even crazier!”

But it would be church where she truly fell in love with singing. She was taken three says a week, for eighteen years. “We didn’t have choir, we didn’t have instruments,” she recalls. “I remember belting at the top of my lungs every week with all of these other people.” It was then that she realised the power of the voice. She believed she wouldn’t be a good guitar player because she had no rhythm, but little did she realise that her voice was her first instrument – and that was something she had already mastered. “Do you sing?” she asks me. I laugh at the idea – no, I don’t. “But do you like singing? When you hum along, or whatever, how does it feel?” Well, when she puts it like that, I guess I do. “That’s why I do it,” she smiles. “It’s the best feeling in the world.”

The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers is about honouring her inner child; the child who begged to play her grandfather’s acoustic guitar; the child who made up songs and dances with her brothers and sisters, playing with sticks to learn the feeling of rhythm. “When you’re little, you have this dream of who you want to be,” says June, “and as you get older, the world starts to tell you ‘No, you can’t do that. No, you can’t do that, either’ – you start to shape who you are based on what society has projected onto you versus listening to your heart and what you know you have come to earth to do. What would the world look like if the positive seeds of our dream life were watered?”

Even though music is ever-present in her life, it was not her first, or only love. She has tried to nurture that sense of fearlessness she felt as a child, refusing to confine herself to any single passion – because while there was music, there was art, too. Her mother is a painter, and June grew up with bold strokes of colour and photography filling the house to the rafters. “I wanted to be like her,” June smiles. “So I learned how to draw and paint, and tried to grow that side of myself.” When she moved to Memphis, she was confronted with a fork in the road. I had to decide if I wanted to go to Memphis College of Art, or if I wanted to follow my dream of music. And luckily,” she laughs, “I was too broke with no scholarships, so I couldn’t go to art school anyway!” Her hand may have been forced, but she never neglected her love for it. “I just woke a book that comes out next month in stores all over the world!” she says. “I did like 200 illustrations for it, and 100 of them made it into the book. There are a lot of poems in there, too! I’m nurturing so many of my dreams at once. I just want to live a life where I can explore as many of my dreams as possible, even if they don’t do anything. Some dreams are just for you – not every dream is for everybody, you know?”

Meditation is something woven into the very fibre of the record. June’s office is her bathtub, her “grounding place”. She paints a picture: “I put my crystals in there,” –clear quartz and amethyst, for clarity and relaxation – “and I use my lavender oil, lemon grass, grapefruit and eucalyptus oils. They just ground everything and put me this right headspace to deal with the craziness of making a record. Some people have a puppy or a lover, or whatever, but when I’m on the road I don’t really have anybody to come home too, so having a peaceful home is important to me.” At the end of the night, she would burn a tea candle, keeping light in the day.

The sanctity of quiet is something her rituals, her meditation and her record all share. “It’s about connecting with nature, with everything that’s happening around us, and carving out these little moments of stillness that make it possible for us to keep moving on,” June explains. “Everywhere you go, there’s an advertisement – there’s something pulling your mind elsewhere – and if we want to dream, and we want to be inspired, then we need our imagination. We can’t just let it be taken away with every commercial. You’ve got to start listening to your heart.” The Moon and Stars... is dusted with these reflective interludes intended to anchor the listener to the present.

While the record is a cornucopia of lessons, encouragement, and hard-won wisdom, what Valerie June would like you to take away from it is this: “For anyone who was a dream, know that it’s worth doing it – it’s worth failing and having doubts. All of that is worth it. At least, then, you can look back at your life and say, ‘Well, at least I fucking tried!’ This record is all about me saying, ‘Yeah, I’m just gonna do it. I’m gonna go on and jump, and try to reach the moon and stars, and we’ll see what happens!’ Maybe I’ll fall – who cares? It’s only in front of the whole world!’”