Photo credit: Renata Raksha

Valerie June that kind of singer-songwriter, the type that no one seems able to nail down but everyone agrees has something special. First, there’s that voice, which— depending on the critic trying to twist together the most on-point adjectives—might be nasal or feline or otherworldly or just plain soulful. She’s been compared to everyone from Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald to Aretha Franklin to Memphis Minnie and, honestly, sounds nothing like any of them. Then there’s her music: Given her rural Tennessee roots, June might be offering up some kind of ethereal new wrinkle on Appalachian-country-bluegrass-soul, or maybe she’s left all of that so far behind that she’s now into an even more indescribable hybrid psychedelic-hippie-folk-blues thing.

Just listen to The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers—her latest album— and it becomes apparent that you’ll only make yourself crazy endeavoring to box it. Ask June to describe her own music and she gives the best answer. She pauses a few seconds, lets out a little chuckle and then says, definitively, “I would say you just have to hear it.”

She’s correct in her assertion. The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers must be experienced with one’s analytical meter disabled. It’s to be absorbed, not judged; luxuriated in, not dissected. The album, produced by Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys, John Legend), follows June’s much-lauded The Order of Time (2017), which followed her breakthrough, Pushin’ Against a Stone (2013), which followed a couple of indie releases. However, June doesn’t listen to any of those anymore—they’re old news. “I’m listening to stuff that we’re working on now,” she says, her focus always on what’s next.

She takes her time getting it right, that’s for sure. Some of the songs on The Moon and Stars were conceived 15 years ago. June—whose full name at birth, 39 years ago, was Valerie June Hockett—bided her time, “writing songs over the course of years and not really thinking about what I’m going to do with them, just writing them.” After meeting Splash, and putting together a core group of supportive musicians, the new album slowly took shape. Its most notable songs, among them the opening “Stay,” “Smile,” “Colors,” “Stardust Scattering” and “Call Me a Fool”—the last featuring Memphis R&B titan Carla Thomas—are June’s most personal to date. Not surprisingly, given the album’s full title, the celestial bodies of the night played a factor in their creation. So did her dreams.

“If you look at the word ‘dream,’ and you look at the words ‘moon’ and ‘stars,’ you think about sleep and magic,” June says. “I needed people to be in that place because if we are going to dream—like Dr. King’s kind of dream, which is a fierce dream that takes a shitload of work, or John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ dream, which is equally as powerful— we’ve got to open up our hearts and we’ve got to have imagination. It’s got to come from a soft place first, and then we roll up our sleeves and we start doing the work.”

The payoff for all June’s hard work is the recognition she now enjoys. One fan is another singer-songwriter, a dude named Bob Dylan, who dropped June’s name a few years back when asked whose music he’d been enjoying lately. (“I was on the floor, on my belly, with my feet kicking and my hands shaking when I saw that,” she says. “I thought, ‘OK, I think I have a master’s degree now. I never went to college but I think I just got a diploma.’”)

Musically, The Moon and Stars is, without question, June’s most progressive recording to date; one might even call it experimental in spots. But she’s too down-to-earth to spend all her time in the clouds looking upward. All of the emotional truths packed into her words retain a firm grounding; that’s deliberate. “I wanted it to be that way,” she says. “I’m an earth sign and that’s important to me— having things rooty. I love plants and I love things being rooted. I even called my early work ‘Organic Moonshine Roots Music.’ I love the arts and I love dirt, so that makes sense to me. You want a solid root so you can go somewhere, so you can grow, so you can blossom. You want to have a garden—you don’t want to just see dead tree trunks. You want to see blooms and flowers.”

June’s own roots point directly to her formative years in Tennessee. She grew up in the small town of Humboldt—which had a reported population of 8,169 in 2019—where she helped her construction worker father promote gospel and R&B concerts. And though she currently lives in Brooklyn, she still spends a good amount of time back home.

In her late teens, June moved to Memphis, soaking up the city’s history and culture. “I was 18, 19 years old and I said, if I want to write songs, I probably should study some of the famous songwriters like Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. So I put myself through some songwriting training.

“But I’ve wanted to do this from the moment I was born,” she adds. “I knew that I didn’t have the voice to sing like professional singers; my voice was weird and odd, and I didn’t believe in it. I knew I wanted to do it, but I was scared. But then I decided that whatever I do in my life should be the thing that I’m scared of. So I decided to go for it, to do what would be the foolish thing to do.”

The risk was worth it. “Now we’re in the stratosphere,” June says. “We’re in the galaxies. We’re in multidimensions, and we’re dancing.”