The Meditations Of Valerie June
The Southern vocalist is conjuring outernational vibrations...
*Valerie June* seems to bring out the beauty of her surroundings.
A green-fingered soul queen, she's spent lockdown conjuring all manner of creations for her mother's Tennessee garden, completely at one with her surroundings.
Indeed, there's a zen-like quality to her gnomic songwriting that feels slightly at odds with the grit her Southern soul influences usually imbue. It's this slight contradiction that lends her work such power - Valerie is able to move with emotional directness, while also channelling something otherworldly.
New album 'The Moon & Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers' lands this week, and it's a fascinating, nuanced, multi-texted experience.
Intrigued, Clash decided to delve a little deeper.
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*How are you doing, Valerie?*
I’m doing good! I’m a little tired but I’m doing good. We filmed a bunch of songs yesterday and the day before so I wake up at 5am every day and quit working at about 11pm every night. So… it’s very weird. Less sleep than I’m used to because I usually sleep a lot.
*Last time we spoke you were falling in love with plants!*
Oh yeah! I started a garden in my Tennessee home with my mom there. In Humboldt in March, right as the pandemic hit, because I was like ‘well I’m gonna be here for a long time! I’m not going on road anytime soon’ so I’m gonna go on and get my garden started in the actual ground versus when I’m in New York I do a container garden outside, out the back. So, the plants were just my friends through the whole thing… so far.
*Plants are good listeners, or so they say.*
Oh yeah! And they like songs and music as Stevie Wonder taught us.
*This new album feels superbly well realised - it’s very complex, but hangs together really well.
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Well I learned so much from working with Matt Marinelli who produced ‘The Order Of Time’, about being fearless and trying to learn about microphones and finally know what the word plug in means, in music. So they were my first teachers, I would say.
And then I met Jack Splash who, to me, was a masterclass high producer in the high arts. Almost like a wizard. He’s very good at guiding people, just a gentle teacher. So, you know how they have all the masterclasses nowadays.
Everything that I have learned from working with those other producers all culminated in this moment and working with Jack, he was like, ‘yeah lets try it!’. Super encouraging to venture beyond because I wanted to. I was learning how to use beats and how to use Logic and all of these things with my music.
I wanted to work with a producer who was going to say ‘yeah, that’s ok, I like that’ versus someone whose like ‘well that’s not Americana, you can’t do that’. Jack was limitless and he’s that way with everything. With art and poetry. Fashion and music and everything.
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*What did Jack bring to the studio?*
I needed someone who knew how to bring the right musicians to play the voices that I hear in my head because I hear music in layers and layers of voices. So Jack and I had time in his studio in LA, where I just hummed and sang parts for him and he’d be like ‘that’s gonna be a guitar’ or ‘we’re gonna have the horns do that’, or whatever.
We already had the basics of the songs and the demos that I’d created with my musicians that I’ve been playing with forever. But, working with him, he was able to give it a multidimensional sound because otherwise it would’ve just been a band in the room sound. It wouldn’t have gone to the different galaxy and had the different textures and layers.
His production just really helped me to be able to bring out the voices that I was hearing. But I couldn’t really tell my band how exactly to do some of the things that we were able to do. When I met Mr Lester Snell, who is this amazing string arranger, he just brought all of the layers to life.
*The arrangements can be quite complex - do you hear all those at one time when writing?*
Well it comes as just one voice at first and then I will choose an instrument to start playing with it. Like with ‘Stay’ I started on the piano just playing block chords because I don’t play piano. I played that for my piano player who was able to really just bring out those block chords and connect C to G to A, you know. Make it smooth. As soon as I hear one voice then I start hearing another one and another one and another one.
Then I get so many voices going at once and in order to get those voices, choose which ones to use and stuff, that’s where its good to have a producer, because otherwise I would just keep adding voices and layers and layers. * That’s the balance I guess. Maybe it comes from just letting the song tell me what it wants. The songs kind of know what they wanna do. They know if they just want to be a voice only, one single voice and a guitar following. Or if they want all of these other voices to really be pronounced. *
*I want to hear the voices but sometimes I have to tell them to just, ‘nope, nope, we’re good’ and carve it out. In doing that also what comes is the style of it. What are the drums on this? What am I hearing? It feels a little bit like this voice of drums is more like a beat, you know. - So then I would get online and just start searching through all of these beats and then going through beats on Apple and listening to different ones until the one matched the one that I was hearing in my head. *
*It’s kinda like you have to shop through this candy store of different pieces before you find the one that fits with the voice that you hear. *
*It’s even like that with musicians in a room where its like, I don’t write music but I know when I hear the sound that fits the song. If that’s a country pedal steel sound then that’s what it is. Then I would just talk to the pedal steel player and be like ‘nope, nope, nope, nope…yes!’ when it feels right. Yeah, that’s the one. The songs kind of tell you what to do. *
**Do you feel the energies of 2020 fed into the record?* *
*It was such a hard year for the planet, for all of us across the globe and in going through everything that we went through and all of the challenges and everything coming to the surface, all around the world. With things we could do to grow closer together, I started to think about what we needed and as the year closed I was like, I just want to put the meditation out and the joyful song of ‘You and I’ because it’s gonna take all of us to shift the energy of the Earth to a more positive and conscious state. That’s where dreams come in.*
*If we want to do that then the only way we can do it is to have wild imaginations and to have dreams. My dreams they come in times where I’m chilling and I’m in my heart. Living really in my meditation space, then I’m like yeah! All these beautiful dreams can start to come forth. And so I wanted to put the positivity out last year to end such a horribly insane year that we all had. I just wanted it to end with something bright. *
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* *Do you have a regular meditative practice?**
* I do. It started with walking meditation and before that it started with doing meditations, I was a domestic artist, how I would say it…I was a cleaning lady for about seven years in Memphis. I just started doing meditations in people’s houses while I was cleaning, so in motion. Just focusing on my breath and every single thing that I would do. Dusting a cup. Washing this. Putting that. Just focussing, breathing in, breathing out. And really, with me, meditation is a state of mind. *
*It’s a state that I put myself in while I’m doing things or I can sit and do it as well. I started it during that time and now, on the road for example, I’ll get to a venue and it’ll be about two o’clock or whatever and I’ll tell the guys, ‘Ok I’m going off on my walk’. And I go for my walk and it can be ten minutes or it can be an hour but I do my walking meditation during that time. I don’t tell them ‘I’m gonna go do my walking meditation!’, I just go do it because I know that’s what I’m gonna need to do in order to be in the mindset that I need to be in, in order to perform. To do what I need to do. And share my art. *
*My goal in meditation is to be able to stay in that state throughout my entire 24 hours. Just stay there. See the world in that state and from that space. Carving out even thirty seconds, like what’s on the record after ‘Home Inside’, that’s a good way to start it. If someone were trying to start meditating. *
*What it means is you’re being more mindful in your existence. And through being more mindful then maybe perhaps something like heavy gun violence that happens in Memphis, someone would be like ‘Well…not today’ ‘I’m not gonna go out there and do those crazy ass things’ ‘I’m gonna take a little break, I’m gonna do my breathing and I’m not gonna pick up this gun and go do something crazy’. It shifts energy and it creates a new portal or place for our energy to be when we focus on our breath. *
**Did you feel yourself being drawn into a meditative state while making the album?**
* It was for sure. When I recently spoke to Jack on the phone he was discussing his life at this time, with his little boy, being at home. All the time with him during the pandemic. He was like ‘I haven’t had time to actually sit and meditate, but I have had moments where I steal away and I go (unintelligible) on the sly’. And he was like ‘if that isn’t meditation! That brings me to the place I need to be to feel like I’m connecting with my inner self and where I’m able to go back to the world and do what I came to do’. *
*So whatever it is that does that, if it’s art or music or just silence. Because I sit in silence a lot. Some musicians listen to a lot of music and I have phases where I do but I have a lot of times where I just listen to the world. Which is on the record. *
*I was recording a tonne of bird song when I was in Tennessee and Jack and I decided to put that on the very end of the record in ‘Starlight Ethereal Silence’. Because it’s there all the time. Moments of meditation and moments of reflection connecting with nature. They’re there in our life and I think those are calls and reminders to connect with your inner self. Check in. *
*For some people it’s your morning and evening practise. But some people it’s just going out and listening to the birds and they’re able to go there, so. It’s consciousness, really. And how you get there, I don’t know. I don’t know how to tell each person to get there. But it just starts to happen when you say: OK I’m gonna shift my focus. I’m gonna shift it right now. It appears. *
**What is the seed of your songwriting?**
* It’s totally the core song and the arrangement is built, added on top of it. So, say with the musicians, to do the basic part of song with ‘Call Me A Fool’ for example, I just went into the studio here in New York with musicians that I’ve been familiar playing with for the last seven or so years. And I’ll play through my song, just me with a guitar, and then we just start. We start recording.*
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* *It’s very organic then?* *
*It’s what’s in the room. When I start hearing voices then I’ll say ‘can we add…this?’ and give a hum or something for that. Even with Jack with the horn arrangements and stuff, it was just humming and him being able to say ‘ok that’s gonna be the horns’ and layering those parts. Really it all starts from just a chord folk song really or, I would call it, a roots song. Because all of the songs can be played just acoustic guitar and voice similar to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. But the production and the layers and the arrangement that comes on top of feeding from the core song. *
**They say travel broadens the mind - do you still feel Southern, or are you more international?* *
*I’ve always felt international. Even when I was living there. Twenty four hours a day. I’m still there about half a year, every four months I go back to Tennessee even if I’m on the road because everything is there. My family and the babies my mom and the lake. Not lake, but pond. The garden. Just being able to see the moon without the city lights blocking the view. I need all of that. *
*So that’s there. But even when I was growing up there I knew that I wanted to see the world. I knew I wanted to travel. If anybody told me a story about Europe or Africa or anything, and my father even said ‘Well you know I know Valerie comes in the house with a friend it’s gonna be a foreigner’ because all of my friends would be from other places and he’d be so curious about asking questions about their part of the world. He never left the area, the South. I’ve always been in my mind beyond just the South. But I’m in my mind beyond just this body too. I don’t even know how to explain that. *
**Have you missed the connection live performances can bring?
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* It’s just gotten to be tough. In the last, I would say, three months. But besides that I feel like I really did good with the time. I was drawing and writing and learning how to paint different things and learning new skills on my guitar. Just really doing things that I wouldn’t get to do at my two hundred days a year travelling. *
*I feel like I needed to slow down. I needed the break. It was forced but that was the upside. Now I’m like ‘oh my god is it over yet’. I had my first vaccine shot last week and I’m like ‘I wanna hug people again and I wanna see the world’. *
*I still haven’t seen the Northern Lights and I want to go to Iceland and I want to South America and to South Africa and India. I have a lot to do. *
**How have you filled that space?* *
*Well, I have been given the courage to share just the side of myself that is beyond music and poetry. When I say I’m not a southerner, I’m not an international being. You know, we’re all other beings, other energies. We’re starlight. *
*I didn’t have the courage to share that side of myself before. It was for me and I think its important for artists to keep sides for themselves. But with all of this I decided that these things have helped me and I wanted to share it with my followers because if it gives them any energy or any positivity or light then that’s what I want them to have. *
*We’ve gotta create a new reality. One that doesn’t do things like what happened on January 6th . One that’s more mindful and connected with each other. I was like: what can I do? What’s my part? And I think we should all ask that question. *
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* 'The Moon & Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers' will be released on March 12th.*
Photo Credit: *Renata Raksha*
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