On Owls, Omens, and Oracles, the Grammy-nominated artist offers a mystical, meditative, sweet, playful and loving suite of music—all recorded live.

It was the height of summer stickiness in Los Angeles in 2024, and Valerie June was deep inside a monthlong recording session with indie icon and producer M. Ward—and she could not stop crying. They weren’t tears of joy, exactly, but they weren’t really sadness either.

June had just wrapped a perfect full-band take of her song “Trust the Path,” a gospel-tinged piano ballad that anchors her latest album, Owls, Omens, and Oracles.

“We all just knew we weren’t going to be able to get another one like that,” she remembers. In the silent moments after the last notes faded, her tears began flowing as a message hit her. The song was exactly what her soul needed: “You gotta trust the path/ I’ll only point the way/ Meet you there, but where I cannot say/ I know you’ll find the way.”

“There’ve been so many times when I’m down and I can’t trust. I look at the world, and it gets me on the ground; it just breaks me. I start losing hope, all my joy and imagination and dreams and wishes,” she says. “And so sometimes I, too, have to be reminded.”

June has always written about spiritual realm—tapping ancestors, nature, and faith for inspiration across her four albums—but never quite as directly as she does with Owls, Omens, and Oracles. And she’s felt that shift ripple through her audience since the record was released in April 2025.

“[This album] has let me know that I’m not alone,” she says. “All the fairies, the witches, the wizards, the Buddhas, the hippies—all of my tribes have been coming out and saying: ‘We see you. I know I’m not alone in the world believing in beauty and joy and magic; believing that we can create a more beautiful world for each other.’”

In a lot of ways, Owls, Omens, and Oracles feels like the album Valerie June was always meant to create. Or maybe, the album that was waiting to come through her. It’s part mystical and meditative, part sweet, playful and loving—and all intimately recorded live.

The Tennessee-born singer-songwriter first broke through in 2013 with Pushin’ Against A Stone, a mix of gritty blues, stunning soul and otherworldly folk. Her songwriting was lauded, but it was her voice that stopped listeners in their tracks. Hers is an unmistakable sound—impossibly fluid, slightly raspy, gentle one moment and gale-force the next.

As Ward says, “Truly unique voices are an endangered species in popular music.”

Though Owls, Omens, and Oracles sounds cut from one cosmic songwriting session, the 14 tracks were culled from June’s notebooks spanning across years. She insists that she never forces a song to emerge; sometimes it peeks out but isn’t quite ready to take shape. Her role is to be prepared when the song is.

“I open my receptors and the songs come through—as if from total darkness, a voice will come from the ether,” she says. “But sometimes you feel a fog, and it could be like that for a decade or two. So I’ll put that skeleton in my journal and walk away. Then it’s like pulling cards; one day I’ll open it back up, and if the song is ready, I’ll be there.”

June and Ward first connected back in 2016 when he was producing an album for Mavis Staples and she contributed a song; they danced around each other for years before finally setting time to collaborate. June had a few dozen songs ready to go, and Ward helped her whittle them down to her finest. They entered 64 Sound—an LA studio stacked with vintage gear—in July 2024 with a handful of musicians ready to give the songs whatever they needed.

For “Calling My Spirit,” that meant nearly nothing. The song was inspired by June’s grandmother’s church on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, where “everybody sang together with no instruments, all these voices layered, singing to each other back and forth.” On record, the track is hushed but powerful: June harmonizing with herself, singing and humming, melodies woven together. She offers a message to not only listeners, but also to herself: “Take the long road, move forward blind. Life’s only purpose is to shine.”

For “Sweet Things Just for You,” June channeled a different ancestor—legendary blues guitarist Mississippi John Hurt, who died nearly 60 years ago. Ward laid down intricate, gentle, finger-picked guitar, and they invited Norah Jones to lend soft background vocals as June coos to a lover: “Just for you, I would swim more than 1,000 seas just to spend a day or night in your good company.”

“I always tell myself that if I was born in the same time as him, I’d coulda been [Hurt’s] wife and cooked him fried chicken every night and taken such great care of him, having a happy life together,” June laughs.

Following the release of Owls, Omens, and Oracles, June continued to emphasize her love of the blues when she hit the road for a series of marquee theater dates from coast to coast, spicing up her setlist of mostly originals with a cover of Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Life I Used to Live,” among others. Then, in late 2025, she released her take on Muddy Waters’ “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” as a standalone single to close out an action-packed year. For her spin on the number, June highlighted the blues’ impact on metal, with the help of producer/bassist Matt Marinelli and drummer Andy Macleod, using her banjo to recreate electric-guitar lines that would make Black Sabbath proud.

Looking ahead, she will turn her attention to an altogether different genre on March 30 when she stops by Nashville’s Ryman during her upcoming spring run to pay tribute to The First Lady of Country Music, Tammy Wynette. The eclectic gig will also feature Wynonna, Ann Wilson, The War And Treaty, Gretchen Wilson, Macy Gray, Lucinda Williams, Mandy Barnett, Tami Neilson, Katie Pruitt and Georgette Jones.

June digs into the connective tissue tying seemingly divergent worlds together as well on Owls, Omens, and Oracles. The record’s pulsing heartbeat is “Endless Tree,” a thumping, marching band-energy anthem asking: “Are you ready to see?/ A world where we could all be free/ Ss branches of an endless tree?”

The seed of the song was June’s relationship with these towering teachers.

“I think about the intertwined root systems of trees, how they’ll care for each other—a cypress connecting to a willow connecting to an oak. I watch how they cooperate instead of competing. What can that teach us about our own communities? What would it look like to put love and light into action versus just talking about them? Are we ready to find out?” says June. “And I heard Curtis Mayfield singing: People, get ready. There’s a train a-comin’. You don’t need no baggage; just get on board...”

June trails off there, but it’s clear she knows the next line of Mayfield’s classic: “All you need is faith.”