Valerie June
Owls, Omens, and Oracles
CONCORD
For West Tennessean songwriter Valerie June, music has always been one faction of a broader project—one that’s equal parts mystic and holistic. Yes, she writes songs, she plays banjo and ukulele, and she sings in an earthy quiver that remains one of roots music’s most pungent pleasures. But she also leads yoga and meditation, pens poems and essays, and emanates healing vibes that seem at once homey and transcendent. A few years ago, she released a set of creative writing prompts called Light Beams: A Workbook for Being Your Badass Self.
She remains her own badass self on Owls, Omens, and Oracles, an album title that only she could get away with. It’s a record that finds June sounding comfortable in her own skin, offering what may be the purest distillation yet of her strange charm and dogged positivity. She made this one with producer M. Ward, who maintains some of the mystic glow of 2021’s The Moon and Stars while also ensuring the songs sound weighty, loamy, earthbound. June’s music has always fallen somewhere between roots revival and pastiche, and with Ward she’s cut a set of songs that sound rooted in tradition but also slightly stylized through her own sense of hippie chic. Check out the fat, rumbling bass line that introduces opener “Joy, Joy!,” one of the gnarliest and funkiest songs in her oeuvre. “Love Me Any Ole Way” is more delightful still, a mardi gras tune where the woozy horns take a backseat to June’s evocative growl.
What makes June’s version of roots music so appealing is that she views it as fertile ground for imagination, not reverent traditionalism. That means a song like “Changed”—featuring Baptist church organ and the Blind Boys of Alabama as a great cloud of witnesses—can fit seamlessly alongside “Superpower,” a moodier tune featuring trap beats and hypnotic spoken word. “Calling My Spirits,” where June harmonizes with birds and crickets, sounds like an ancient transmission from another astral plane, while the knowing “My Life Is a Country Song” merely sounds as ancient as the Grand Ole Opry.
June is a self-styled healer, and Owls, Omens, and Oracles is presented as an antidote to the rancor and malaise of our present era. “Joy, Joy!” refuses to equate the Black experience with suffering alone, while “Endless Tree” dreams of a world beyond division, where all of us are leaf-bearing branches in some everlasting arbor. The mysticism of that song is mirrored in several others, including “Trust the Path,” which rests in the benevolence of the universe. For some, these spiritual gestures will seem well-intentioned but vague. Not to worry: The love songs tether June to the incarnate particulars of skin and bone. “All I Really Wanna Do” and “Love Me Any Ole Way” revel in sensuality, providing a helpful contrast to more inward-looking songs of resilience, like “Inside Me.”
Valerie June albums increasingly sound like nothing or no one but her, and Owls, Omens, and Oracles conjures her distinct, endearing personality as well as any of them. It won’t fully immunize us to the toxicity of the times, yet simply spending a few minutes in June’s headspace can’t help but feel healing.
