Valerie June on the songs that move her and the stories she tells
Tennessee native Valerie June has been making music professionally for more than a decade, but only recently has the 31-year-old artist earned the sort of attention she deserves. Her 2013 breakthrough, Pushin’ Against a Stone, produced by the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, is her fourth studio album.
Stone, like June herself, is otherworldly, hanging on the air somewhere between traditional Appalachian country and Delta blues, with June’s voice ringing out like a strange bell. We spoke with June by phone ahead of her opening for Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings at Liberty Hall.
The Pitch: The title track from your record just kills me.
June: Almost every time I have a show, somebody’ll be like, “That song was powerful, and I really wanted to cry,” and I think that’s good. It’s emotional music. You gotta move your spirit in a way when you listen. It’s funny because I’ve been getting gifts from people — fans, I guess you could call ’em, audience members. I get the weirdest things: spiritual things, necklaces, books and notes and things like that. I think it makes people’s spirits move, and their hearts move in a way.
Your album is full of songs — “Workin’ Woman Blues,” “Trials, Troubles, Tribulations” — that reflect perseverance through a dark time. Is that how you found those songs?
I don’t really know where they come from. I just hear the voice of the song. But if you believe in the Buddhist way — not that I’m Buddhist, but that suffering is there and it’s in every moment. It’s gotta be fuel for something positive. You can’t use it to keep you down. These challenging things come into your life, and you just have to say, “I accept this and I’m moving forward.” That’s all you can do.
Everybody’s life is like that, you know. We’re constantly dealing with so much and feeling so much, and we just have to take all of that and use it to keep standing and moving forward.
There’s a lot of people that put that feeling into music for me, and when I feel that, it’s really something. Like when I listen to “Sitting Here in Limbo” by the Grateful Dead. I’m just dying inside. It does something to me. It makes me realize that I’m not gonna be here forever, that even if challenging times come, that I need to move forward because this is my only time here. I think a lot of the songs that I write have that feeling in them.
Growing up, you were influenced by the music your concert-promoter dad was into and singing in church. What inspires you now?
I have this stack of records that I got just recently, mostly blues stuff. Most of these records that I have, they have the same songs on them, but they’ll be done by a blues artist and then they’ll be done by an Appalachian artist, but it’s the same song, and they’ll tell a different story in each one. One of those songs is called “Trouble in Mind,” and I have it on a Nina Simone record and a Lightnin’ Hopkins record and a Roscoe Holcomb record. That song has bounced around so many places. We used to sing a version of it in church when I was little before I even knew who these people were. [Laughs.] I had my own version of the song from when I grew up.
It’s really cool to go song searching like that and to find connections between the races and the times and the genres. And I enjoy listening to different people’s stories because the white man’s story is not the same as the black man’s story, and the woman’s story is not the same as the man’s story.
Your songs are very story-oriented. How many of them are Valerie June the person and how many are Valerie June the storyteller?
It’s as much of me as it is of you. I write a lot of songs, but the songs I sing night after night — I don’t sing them if I can’t personalize them. I have a book full of songs I’ve written, and I could just sing something that I don’t feel, but I don’t do it. The other songs, they just sit in this book. And I’m waiting for the day that I will meet someone that I can give them to. When I can say, “Now this song, this is you. You got to sing this. I wrote this one for you.” That’s the way I do it. I go through [the songs I’ve written] and I choose the ones that I really, really feel, that are just mine.
You know when you get a record and you listen to it, and one song on the record jumps out at you. You say to yourself, “That’s my song! That right there is my song!” That’s how I go through my songs. I go through them and I think, “This one, right here, I could sing this one 365 nights a year and still feel it.” That’s my story. And it’s not just my story — it could be someone else’s story by the end. The stories are alive, and they change all the time, even for me.
