SPOTLIGHT: Valerie June Clings to Joy on ‘Owls, Omens, and Oracles’

Like an alter with mystical crystals, holy spirits, and positive energies, everything about Valerie June’s fourth studio album is offered right there in the title — Owls, Omens, and Oracles.

Calling from her home in Brooklyn, seated in in front of enough shelving with vinyl records to cover the entire Zoom background, June explains that she splits her time between the city and rural Tennessee lands where she grew up. The owls, she begins, came to her there:

“I’ve seen everything, snakes, frogs, turtles, like muskrat, coons…all kinds of birds, but never an owl.”

One early morning, around 5 or 6 a.m., while June was drinking her first cup of tea in the Tennessee house, she spied one of the wise, winged creatures standing on a post across the pond.

“This fog is rolling and there’s the owl and there’s me with the cup of tea steaming up. And I was like, ‘Is this real?’ It was just staring at me, so I just said [to myself], ‘Okay, be really still.’ Because sometimes when animals come to the pond, if they see us kind of moving around, then they’ll fly away or leave. So I was like, ‘Be really still and just have your tea with this owl.’”

Each time June returned to Tennessee over the next year-and-a-half, the owl kept visiting her on its post. She turned to her medicine cards, animal deck, stories, and fables to learn more. The owl is known for its wisdom, of course, but June also acknowledges “the mystery and the darkness and its ability to see in the dark. There’s uncertainty around death that [the owl] symbolizes, so being able to cope with loss, but also see through dark times to light times Although it’s mysterious, it hides nothing. It sees all. It doesn’t bypass anything.”

As for the omens, June acknowledges the heaviness of the current “poly-crisis with economics, with climate, with politics.”  When the overwhelm takes hold, she turns to music, dance, visual art, and nature.

“I need to see a rainbow. Send me a four-leaf clover, some kind of omen,” she muses. “That’s what songs do for me.”

Finally, the oracles serve as homage to lineage, legacy, connection, and change. Recently, June was invited to Middlebury College and spoke on a panel with Elder Albert Marshall, an Indigenous leader from the Mi’kmaw Nation whose elders taught him to envision how today’s actions will impact people seven generations away. When June began to explore her ancestry (which she shared on her Instagram this past February in honor of Black History Month), she also turned inward to assess how the choices she’s making now might affect the next seven generations.

“I think about how free I am, what rights that I do have, and how I can be the oracle for those who are coming in every action we’re making, each day — from a cup of tea to water usage to whatever we’re using and doing. We’re the future keepers and the ancestors.”

Explaining the title of June’s new album, which came out April 11, 2025 via Concord Records, is a helpful framework for audiences who want to understand the depth of Owls, Omens, and Oracles, past each individually catchy tune. Each song falls into at least one category, if not multiple.

June seems grateful for the opportunity to explain and laughs off the amount of time it took to dig into the symbolism: “As a person who works in positivity and joy, a lot of times, people are like, ‘Oh, that’s so fake. That’s just hippie shit.’ But I see what’s happening. I see what has been happening. I know the history. I study the history. You can’t do what I do and not do that.”

Finding Her Voice

Over her nearly 20-year musical career, people have tried to pigeonhole June into a number of different musical categories. In fact, Apple Music’s only description for Owls, Omens, and Oracles is just, “A stew of influences makes for a soulful, uncategorizable sixth LP.”

But it’s that same confluence of influences, regardless of how exasperating it may (or may not) be to try to describe, that makes June’s music so engaging and powerful. Growing up in Western Tennessee she and her family went to a Black church with 500 attendees — all using their voices with no instruments. “Your voice had to become an instrument” she describes. When she was about 12 years old, though, the family moved across town and began going to that local church, which was mostly white. “They sang the same songs, but more so from a head voice. So the acoustics between them kind of shaped my voice.”

June can whisper, growl, howl, coo, warble, buzz, and trill. She can infuse vibrato in her voice or carry a single note without a single tremble. And so on top of a mostly acoustic label debut like 2013’s Pushin’ Against a Stone, her songs are called folk, country, or Southern music. But mixed into the experimental levels of 2017’s The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, they’re called orchestral pop with a touch of soul. In some ways, all of these descriptions are accurate, which makes June one of the most exciting and identifiable vocalists of a generation.

“I like idiosyncratic voices that are like maybe even a little edgy or raw or emotional or bitter, breaking or sharp or [with] imperfection,” she says.

On Owls, Omens, and Oracles, she’s found the perfect balance of so many styles and how to blend them into one cohesive work of art. Songs like “Love Me Any Ole Way,” “Sweet Things Just for You” (which itself gives a quick wink to “Raindance” from her 2008 self-released Mountain of Rose Quartz), and “Missin’ You (Yeah, Yeah)” lean more toward her earliest recordings with their sparser, guitar-centric instrumentation. Elsewhere, songs like “Inside Me” and “Superpower” integrate layered vocals and spoken word elements. (“Superpower” even features June reading her poem “Blank Page,” originally published in her 2021 chapbook Maps for the Modern World).

Nestled near the end of the record is a “My Life Is A Country Song,” an autobiographical ballad that features June on banjo. As she narrates her earliest divorce and through the context of the assumed country music’s common narratives versus reality, the song also seems to be a sort of sequel to “Got Soul” off 2017’s The Order of Time, in which June tackles the stereotypes and contradictions of genres. Finding these subtle through lines through her life and art, help make Owls, Omens, and Oracles some of June’s finest work yet.

Still, learning to use her voice has been a different journey. When she first moved to Memphis, June found that musical stereotypes followed her everywhere — based on her race, gender, or choice of instruments.

“Finding my voice in in the world and speaking truth, that’s a hard one,” she begins. “It’s not that I spent my life before the pandemic, not speaking my truth, because to walk in a room and be who I am and look like I look and get in front of people,” she continues, choosing her words carefully “I broke open the door for a whole lot of my sisters, just to be in there. There’s a certain amount of my voice that I could use, and I knew that if I use a certain amount more, then I’m gonna be closing that door. So I use my image a lot more than I use my actual speaking voice.”

Once she began getting more and more opportunities like with Folk Alliance International, South by Southwest, and even like the aforementioned event at Middlebury College, she began to feel more confident in her speaking voice as well.

“My biggest thing is that as artists, we can ask the questions. We can inspire people to ask questions, that ask more questions, that ask more questions. And to ask questions is a very dangerous thing,” she says. “You realize the power of art now. So what questions can we ask to keep that momentum with the change going?”

Joy As a Practice

The first song and lead single on Owls, Omens, and Oracles is titled “Joy, Joy!” It’s a defiant stance to take, not only to open the record, but also considering the state of the world in 2025. Kaveh Rastegar’s rumbling bass and Stephen Hodges’ shuffling percussion carry June’s voice through the first voice until the full band — featuring a horn section and strings — erupts in the chorus.

You’ll find dat joy joy in your soul.

It’s so musically forceful and funky, and June’s voice is so assured, that the affirmation is believable even on the hardest days.

So much of the joy of this record comes from the collaboration it took to make it. M. Ward, a singer-songwriter and beloved collaborator in his own right, produced Owls, Omens, and Oracles and was foundational in making so many of the album’s connections. June and Ward first worked together in 2016 when she contributed a song for Mavis Staples’ Livin’ On A High Note record that Ward produced. In 2023, they both played the Newport Folk Festival on the same day and reunited a few months later at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. A year and a half later, the talks of collaborating that began during festival season finally come to fruition. Ward invited June out to his Los Angeles recording studio, where the two worked out all 14 tracks. Additionally, Ward called in Norah Jones to guest on “Sweet Things Just for You” and June recruited the Blind Boys of Alabama on “Changed.”

Still, that commitment to joy is a practice, and one that takes work. June relies on short walks, breath work, mantras, yoga, and community to maintain that balance and perspective.

“It is hard, and I can say that I slip up pretty much every single day,” she says. “My mother will check me. My sisters check me. My band will check me. We have to be responsible for checking each other and be like, ‘Well, that wasn’t very mindful.’  … This is not a solo act, practicing joy. It’s very communal. We have to do it together, because it’s just not easy.”

She continues, “Through music, through art, through fashion, through many different ways, I get these little jolts of inspiration that keep me motivated.

“We’re all kind of feeling voiceless, and so that’s where art comes in and where yoga comes in and where living a life that is a practice of joy comes in. It’s not easy, and it is a practice every day. … It’s actually work to practice joy.”

Valerie June’s Owls, Omens, and Oracles came out April 11, 2025 via Concord Records.