Valerie June
Valerie June has opened her deepest channel yet to create her fourth studio album, Owls, Omens, and Oracles. The Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter and three-time Americana Music Honors and Awards nominee weaves fresh medicinal downloads of love, sweetness, goodness, and joy together with songs that have flowed through her for years. Halfway through a decade of immense and rapid global change, she asserts a multidimensional Blackness steeped in laughter, truth, magic, delight, and interdependence. The opening track and first single, “Joy, Joy!”, gives us an irresistible, playful, and effervescent invitation to surrender to the light always available in our souls. This album is a radical statement to break with the skepticism, surveillance, and doom scrolling – let yourself celebrate your aliveness. Connect, weep, change, open. Rooted in the belief that what we focus on is what we manifest, June dreams a songpath forward that leaves no one behind. She has been softening and clarifying her sound since the 2013 release of Pushin’ Against A Stone, through The Order of Time, The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, and Under Cover. From the Kennedy Center and opening for The Rolling Stones at Hyde Park to supporting Tyler Childers, Trevor Hall, Brandi Carlile, Gary Clark Jr., and John Prine, June offers us a root system spanning Earth’s magma core to the cosmos. This newest work shows Valerie’s own spiritual growth, her deepening, the opening of ancestral channels into both her glorious voice and her tender lyrics.
Photo Credit: Trayvs Owen/courtesy of artist