Organic Moonshine

"I make no moves fast,” says Valerie June, which is something of an understatement from a woman who is running permanently on 'Tennessee time'. She sat on her latest album, Pushin' Against A Stone, for a full four years before releasing it. “I didn't know if I wanted to put it out or not, because it's all over the place,” she explains.

The music of the Tennessee-born singer songwriter runs the gamut of influences she absorbed from the rural roots of the western United States continent. June was raised in Humboldt, Tennessee, right in the musical bosom, an hour from Memphis and two hours from Nashville, where you couldn't move without hearing country and blues music. Added to that melting pot of influences, as a child, June sang a cappella gospel at her church three times a week, and her father was – and still is - a gospel music promoter. June had collected this spectrum of musical sounds by the time she moved – for love - to Memphis in her early 20s, where she broke onto the local folk and blues circuit as a solo artist.

June describes her style, which is steeped in gospel, country, folk and foot-stomping blues, as organic moonshine roots music. She came up with the label because she prefers to define her music in her own words rather than allowing it to be shaped by other people's definitions. “I called the music organic moonshine roots music, and now I have to live up to it, which isn't always easy,” she laughs. It's a style, she says, that has a life of its own. “It's constantly changing and growing. I think that the sound is really alive and that it continues to come into itself. Like even when I record the songs it's like taking a picture. So say you get your picture taken every single day for a year, every single picture looks like you but none of them are the same. So when I record the songs they sound this way and then as I begin to play them, say with a UK band, or with a US band or solo or however I play 'em, then they have different versions or different energies so it's constantly evolving and changing. It has that organic feeling because it's really just alive, you know. Every single song has its own body and its own feeling.”

June released three studio albums before coming to the attention of MTV who featured her on $5 Cover, a reality show that followed a group of independent Memphis musicians struggling to make a career out of music. The program led her to the attention of The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, who offered to help write and record what became Pushin' Against A Stone, which was eventually released on Rob Da Bank's label, Sunday Best.

“I chose to write songs with Dan because I think he gets roots music and he understands southern music in a way that I really appreciate. And Kevin (Augunas) is just somebody who came into my life and happened to be really, really great at capturing that old sound. He's a producer, that's all he does is produce, and so he has this vision, Dan has his own vision and I have my vision and we all just get together. And I did the stuff with the Hungarian musicians and with Booker T so that kind of happened in its own organic right, after I'd worked with Kevin and Dan, so these are funny, funny funny things that happen at random, different times. And it all happened about four years ago…”

June was reluctant to release the album because she couldn't find its common thread. “I had to sit with it and I had to ask myself, 'Can I play it every night?' I just sat with it and I said 'What about the record is a theme?' and I just felt like the theme of the record was my voice. It doesn't matter if I'm singing on a song that totally sounds like a Black Keys song or if I'm singing on a traditional gospel or song of trials, troubles, tribulations or if I'm singing a murder ballad, the common theme of all the songs is that it's my voice.” Hers is a distinctive, reedy vocal style that sounds something midway between Dolly Parton and Erykah Badu, and it was 'the thread that runs from beginning to the end. So I just said, you know what? I wrote almost all of the songs on the record, and even though it goes all over the place, I think people will be able to hear what my voice can sound like in various formats and they'll just appreciate it as just good music and I should put it out and I should move on with my life. That's what I decided”.