LET A THOUSAND JOYS BLOOM SAYS VALERIE JUNE
- Bernard Zuel
- 6 hours ago
- 7 min read
BETWEEN ALBUMS, BETWEEN CONVERSATIONS with Valerie June (who keeps her Hockett surname for relatives like the ones she is visiting in Memphis at the moment), between deep valleys of despair at this messed up world, I saw Waxahatchee play last year. And it felt right then, and right for today as June comes on the screen.
Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, like June a woman of the South who amalgamates American music rather than separating them (and someone who June has expressed admiration for), wasn’t saying anything explicitly like this but I know I wasn’t the only one who came away from that show feeling it had been an invitation to love life and to let people in. A sentiment not a million miles from Joy Joy, the opening song on June’s new album, where she sings “There is a light you can find, if you stop to take the time/Know when it’s right, rise and shine/The seas will part, the stars align/You will find that joy in your soul … that joy, that joy”.
I know right? Bloody hippies! But there’s something about both of them that essentially show us that that’s a good way to live.
“Well, I think, why not?,” June says to this. “Why not? So does that make me positive or negative? I don’t know, but I choose to see things from a positive perspective because so much of our lives is pushing us in the other direction. So why not make our conscious choices ones that steer towards joy, beauty, light, positivity. Things that bring happiness in a spirit. We might be sad, but that’s a part of it too.”
Hey, that’s pretty much the foundation of gospel music isn’t it? The idea that no matter how bad things are, how low you may get, there is a light or a hope or a future. You can hear gospel in June’s work, alongside soul and folk and blues. You could argue you hear gospel in the spirit of her books of life philosophy. You can hear gospel in her attitude. To a degree.
“I was raised a very strict Christian, going to church, and that was the foundation of my life growing up. I don’t think that I’d left it, I think I built upon it because I started to study other people’s cultures and beliefs, throughout history even, and it kind of expanded my love for this existence and this time that we get to be here,” she says. “My family is still very religious – we just lost someone in my family and different people were saying different things about where their spirit has gone – and I like to be the observer. I like to not tell people any rights or wrongs, which is very different from my upbringing, because they would very much tell me what was right and wrong.”
Lest any of this sound like the aforementioned hippies, especially when June describes how “life is such a playground for creativity and I sometimes get frustrated when we keep creating the same scenarios of oppression and depression”, there’s a steeliness beneath it. A history behind it.
“My positivity is definitely steeped in the pain of my people. We carry a lot, and I’m not coming to it lightly,” she says. “I’m from the roots of enslaved southern spirits who were beaten, who were pushed back, who were raped, murdered, hung, wrenched, so I don’t come to it lightly; I come to it knowing that we can do better as humans.”
Maybe this is the explanation for why people like me who usually run away, very fast, from those who claim to have advice on how to live, have been ready to take some inspiration from her over the years in trying to find the joy, looking to be something better for other people. Why does she think we listen to her but would throw back any book in the self-help aisle?
“Maybe because I don’t know. I don’t know shit,” she laughs. “And I’m just an explorer too. I try to show people the way to their own creativity because I think as soon as we start to love art, to love music, to love dance, to love magical things that have been created by others, then we can kind of open up something in us. Like a spirit that we don’t even have a word for. And it goes even deeper than religion, like when that song comes on the radio and it just stops everything.
“I’m not trying to tell folks how to live their life because I don’t know; I’m trying to figure out how to live my own and bringing everyone on for the parade as I’m going through.”
Not telling anyone how to live is fine and admirable. But not telling them what you think can sometimes be an issue. When people speak of Valerie June the think of her as a songwriter, a poet, author, “a keeper of dreams”, to borrow her own term, but she is explicitly not a commentator on politics and the world intersecting with politics.
When I first spoke with her in 2017 there was a question then floating about the ether about why that album, The Order Of Time, seemed to exist separate from the ugly world of Donald Trump we were experiencing. She had a good answer for it at the time (beginning with they had been written well before Trump, and including the line that merely existing as southern, black and a woman, was a political act) but she is back and so is he. Are people still asking her to address it? Address him?
“Well, I don’t know if they are asking me as much as they did then, because I think people kinda got to a point now where they’re like, ‘Lord, we’ve been there and now we’re back, oh my goodness’,” June says. “But what I do think is that the things that are in [her most recent book on life lessons], Light Beams: A Workbook For Being Your Badass Self, they are what I believe politically. And it’s in there in the full and I’m not making you wait to the last page; I’m throwing that shit on the first row of the book.”
In it she argues that there are both nature-made and man-made parts of our lives, our societies, and since “we do have the collective power” to shape that, what if we stop focusing on one man or one body politic and got at the roots of it all rather than the headlines.
“It’s not that we don’t need to know; we need to, we need to be very well aware, we need to know what’s happening in the world,” June says. “But once we know, shift the energy immediately because there is no time to waste, not a moment. Not a second of our existence can be wasted in that direction, and that’s why I don’t focus my energy in that direction when I’m in an interview.”
In truth there is nothing more political to say in this moment than joy joy, and more joy.
“Hell yeah!”
On this new album, Owls, Omens And Oracles (ok, no one is saying there isn’t a little bit of hippie in her, but that’s ok), June sings “You gotta trust the path, I’ll only point the way.” When I wonder if that is her job, to show us it’s possible, then leave it to us to get there, even the idea of showing begins to sound a little dictatorial to her, and there’s a flash – and only a flash – of frustration.
“That’s not me! When I hear the song, I hear voices that are bigger than me, that are saying I’ll point the way, and that way for me is different to the way for you. Maybe your way is that you need to go to that self-help aisle; maybe another person’s way is they need to turn the hell away from it,” June says. “I’m gonna get myself out of the way and let y’all. If you sing that song right now and said trust the path, I’ll only point the way, then you are the ‘I’; it’s no longer me being the I. So I step outside of. I just do my job, I do as I’m told. I receive the songs, I sing the songs, and I give them to you, and you do what you want to do with them.”
Nonetheless, I have to seek some advice from her given the impossibly appealing title of her. So, how do I unleash my badass self?
June laughs so hard at this – gee, thanks Valerie, how to kick a suburban nobody while he’s down! – that it takes a minute to compose herself.
“That whole book is full of exercises that I use, but what I find amazing is when I started to share my exercises then other people started sharing theirs, and everyone has it,” she says. “It’s just remembering that we all have a badass self that we have to choose to live up to it, and is not always easy.”
If it was easy we wouldn’t need Valerie June albums on a regular basis, we could just sit there with a drink or three and say that was easy, I might go again.
“Hey if that works,” she laughs again. “If that’s what’s going to get you there, you go for it. I ain’t judgin’.”
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Owls, Omens And Oracles is out now on Concord Records.
Light Beams: A Workbook For Being Your Badass Self is published by Andrews McMeel.