Valerie June is recalling her youth in West Tennessee, near Humboldt. “I didn’t have natural rhythm. Like, I had to learn how to clap on the beat. They used to call me ‘white girl’ in the cheerleading squad! They were all white themselves, and they were like, ‘Girl, you ain’t got no rhythm!’ and would call me white girl. To this day, I want to dedicate my life to learning some rhythm.”
The irony is that June, starting right out of the gate with the deft percussion and Afrobeat horns on her debut album’s opening track, “Workin’ Woman Blues,” has always been open to mashing up folk forms with a bit of groove. But the anecdote reveals her lifelong approach to her art as a student and a seeker, since before she moved to Memphis and began playing coffee shops and bars here. Over the years, every album she’s recorded since moving to Brooklyn has had its own personality. Yet the current moment, she says, feels the closest to her earliest years, when any old sound seemed up for grabs.
“It’s almost like when I first started on the guitar, playing those early folk songs like ‘Crawdad Song,’ or whatever,” June says. “I’m almost doing that same thing with the experimentation I’m doing as a musician right now. I want to do it with old songs. I want to do it with things that are familiar to me and to people. And I think when I do that, I kind of stir in this soup of those old songs, live or in the recording studio.”
That’s one way into her new EP, “Brighter Blue,” just released last week. The titles — “I’ll Fly Away,” “Trouble in Mind,” “Smokestack” — are familiar enough, but for June, the sound is a whole new bag. The electric guitars crunch with an almost grunge-level howl, the grooves are upbeat and funky, and John Deley’s Hammond B3 organ is incendiary.
June explains that while touring last year’s Owls, Omens, and Oracles, “I didn’t know that this band was gonna be so bent on rocking until we did our first show at Town Hall in New York City, and they blew me away. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna have to step up!’ Well, then I went and I did a bunch of solo stuff, and I didn’t have the guys. They were doing other things, until Christmastime came and I said, ‘Oh my god, we have got to capture in the studio what we built so energetically on the road.’”
That energy bristles throughout “Brighter Blue,” where songs older than dirt become charged with her band’s 21st-century perspective. While crediting the players for much of that harder-hitting spark, she also notes that edgier guitar work is in her own DNA. “Speaking of the rocking side of things, you know Jesse Mae Hemphill, Sister Rosetta Tharpe — I’ve studied their work for years,” she says. “I haven’t been able to achieve what they did, guitar-wise. But lately, I think it’s starting to click for me. I’m starting to really understand, like, oh, if I tune the guitar this way and I beat that note right there, then I’m gonna get that sound.”
Crucially, June finds that “stirring in the soup” of old chestnuts inspires new concoctions. “‘Trouble in Mind,’” she says, “I listened to people singing that at church, or wherever, throughout my life. Or ‘I’ll Fly Away.’ I grew up on that song.” Now, when revisiting such classics, she says, “songs start to come to me. I haven’t gotten very many songs that are in my own space yet, but as soon as I start working in that [classic roots] area, I’ll start to get more. So, they’re the key. The songs that are already here, the songs that already exist, old roots songs, old gospel songs — they are the key for my own work. Do you see what I mean? If I turn the key, then the other things from my realm will start to come to me, things that are not in the world yet. But I have to have that key first.”
Valerie June, with a full band, plays Satellite Music Hall at 7 p.m. on Thursday, September 17th. Soul and blues legend Vaneese Thomas, daughter of Rufus Thomas, opens the show.
