
Valerie June on Finding the Right Guitar, Crafting Her Sound, and Channeling Magic Through Music
Valerie Juneâs soundscapes stretch from Memphis soil to cosmic skies. Her voice is a mix of earth and ether, channeling gospel, blues, and folk traditions into something unmistakably her own.
âIâm basically an ambassador for joy,â she says, and itâs hard to argue otherwise. Juneâs latest album, Owls, Omens, and Oracles (Concord), offers a mix of love, sweetness, and light. Whether sheâs playing the Newport Folk Festival or opening for the Rolling Stones, she creates a space where celebration and reflection coexist.
A Grammy and Americana Music Honors nominee, June has built her career around radical invitationsâchallenging listeners to embrace joy as a form of resistance. An author, poet, and certified mindfulness instructor, she has recorded three best-selling solo albums, written for legends like Mavis Staples and the Blind Boys of Alabama, and earned praise from Bob Dylan. Along the way, sheâs collaborated with artists as wide ranging as John Prine, Norah Jones, Robert Plant, and Brandi Carlile.
This time, sheâs joined by producer M. Ward, with contributions from the Blind Boys of Alabama, Norah Jones, and DJ Cavem Moetavation. When not on tour, she divides her time between Tennessee and New York.
On a crisp late winter morning, I caught up with June on a Zoom call. We began with a tarot reflectionâpulling the owl card from the Spirit Deck, a symbol of wisdom and deep vision. It felt like the perfect place to start.
Letâs talk about owl medicine. What does it mean to you?
Thereâs a pond behind our house in Tennessee. One morning when I was making tea I saw an owl perched on a post across the water. I get visits from all kinds of animals, but owls are rare so I went to the deck thinking, what does it mean?
Magic, mystery, and even darknessâthe owl feels like the ultimate oracle. Iâm basically an ambassador for joy, and people are oftentimes like, âThatâs so fake, youâre bypassing shit.â But thatâs not my truth. My truth is understanding the darkness and understanding the night and the hard times and choosing to be in a place of joy.
The elders of indigenous communities I meet say that they were taught to think of seven generations in their actionsâseven generations past and present. I thought, Iâm this Black woman from the South. My people were enslaved. I donât know a lot about them. I have no real culture from my family line that I can pull from, so let me listen to these elders, these plants and animals, this pond and the water and the sky.
I look at this world and say, âWho am I gonna be when Iâm gone for those that are to come?â I think all of us today are oracles. We are telling the future in our actions. And the owl is saying, âOkay, I donât know if yâall know, but yâall in a dark time. You about to have to make some quick, fast changes. What are you gonna choose?â
What are some of the practices you do to cultivate that joy?
One of the big practices I do is cry. Sunny War wrote the song âCry Babyâ and asked me to sing on it, and it resonates because I feel grief in this world today. When I go to joy, it is absolutely a choice. I lean toward blues and dark stuff. A lot of what I wrote before I started receiving songs of positivity were dark songs.
Do dark songs come differently?
The first time I met PJ Harvey, she asked me how I write songs. I was like, âWell, I hear voices.â She said, âSometimes I hear voices, but I really see films.â I have written one song like that, âShotgun.â I saw a white farmhouse, a door kind of open, fields all around with the grass tall and blowing. Nobody was in the house, but the energy was dark like Robert Johnsonâs âIf I Had Possession Over Judgment Day.â He sings, âIf I had possession over judgment day, Lord, the little woman Iâm loving wouldnât have no right to pray.â
So many songs from that tradition were murder ballads, abusive toward women, but I think that was coded language for the oppression they were facing. Thatâs what I did with âShotgunâ after so much gun violence, but I donât want to sing it. Itâs dark, even though it was moving toward a healing place. People donât always dive into a song and ask, âWell, what do you think she was thinking about when she wrote this song?â Iâm not saying that people are stupid. Iâm just saying weâre busy, and we donât have the time to go deeper.
Thatâs amazing. Iâm going to use that. âI donât think youâre stupid, youâre just busy.â
Itâs true! It goes even deeper, but we ainât got time. Letâs talk about guitars!
Tell me about the Martin guitar you play. When did it come into your life?
Actually, I have two of them now! The last time I spoke to Acoustic Guitar [in 2014, for the magazineâs Sessions video series âed.], I only had that one. I had just made Pushinâ Against a Stone and was flying back to Tennessee from Canada when my guitar was busted up on the flightâtotally destroyed.
It was a Gibson, like Robert Johnson played, an L-1. It was tiny, fit perfectly to my little body, and it broke my heart. I named that guitar Clyde after my grandfather because he gave me my first guitar, a little red Mexican guitar with paintings on the front that was in his closet my whole life until I finally begged so long for one my Granny made him give it to me.
When I got to Nashville and told Dan Auerbach [of the Black Keys] my Gibson was busted, he said, âGet a Martinâtry something new. Go downtown to Gruhn and play them and see what happens.â The salesman wouldnât sell me the first guitar I liked. He brought five or six more in that style and said, âYouâre gonna sit here and play each one, and the one that you feel is the one youâre gonna get.â I fell in love with one [a 000-15] and I went to buy it. He said, could you read out the serial number to me? He was filling out this little form and I read the serial number, and the last four digits were my phone number. And I was just like, this is definitely mine.
You have this really cool open right-hand technique. Is that something you learned or just picked up?
I picked it up. I tried some teachers but Iâm not a good student. I donât have natural rhythm so the way they would teach, I just couldnât do it.
What do you mean you donât have natural rhythm?
Shoot. I just donât.Â
How would you pick up that Senegalese highlife rhythm that you do so naturally if you didnât have rhythm? You were a polyrhythm master from the get-go!Â
Well, OK. Thank you. You just kind of changed my life right there.
How would you describe what you do with your right hand?
I just like to play that way. I have very long fingers, and I donât want to have pain in my hand, so I shifted the way I was playing and I got to where I was very comfortable. Itâs about following what feels good.
On âSweet Things Just for You,â is that you playing?
No. Thatâs M. Ward.
I wondered because thereâs this alternate-thumb thing I hadnât seen you do.
Itâs similar to my song âRain Danceâ that I do alternate thumb on. I wrote it in the spirit of Mississippi John Hurt, but I donât do the noodles. I played my version of it for M. and I was like, âOK. So, this song goes like this, but with the Mississippi John Hurt noodles.â He got the noodles in there.
Do you ever use fingerpicks?
No, I like to feel the strings on my skin, the vibration of the instrument against my body, the smell of the wood.
So, when youâre switching between banjo, uke, and guitar, do you have to physically recalibrate?
Itâs part of my nature now. I play them all very similarly. You know how people have different stylesâthey clawhammer or fingerstyle or whatever with banjo. I play the banjo the same as I play the guitar. My friends who went to art school, their professors told them to learn the rules so they can break them. Thatâs cool, but I ainât got time for that. I gotta sit down here and play it like I can play it. I was already 25, 26, when I picked it up. I had to get goinâ!
Valerie June, Photo: DVSROSSYouâre following what feels good.
When I first started with the instrument, trying so hard to get a rhythm would create a pain in my shoulder and I was like, âNow, how am I going to make it to 80 doing this?â I rethought that situation, and I was like, âThis feels good, letâs do this.â
Whatâs your sound setup onstage? Do you play through an amp or just straight through the system?
Usually just through the system, through the L.R. Baggs preamp, but I love artists who put their acoustic guitar through amps. I saw Lightninâ Hopkins do that and I love that sound. Sometimes I do that, but not onstage because I havenât learned how to master feedback with acoustic instruments and vocals.
I like a dirty blues, filthy, grungy acoustic guitar sound. I also like clean stuff, but I love when itâs just a dark rock ânâ roll acoustic sound, you know? And thatâs hard to do live. In my own space, when Iâm working on the songs, I will plug in my little Pignose amp and crank that junk up and play with some pedals and go crazy.
Do you take both Martins out with you on tour?
I usually just take one, and I take two electric guitars because I use different tunings. And my banjo and ukulele travel together as the baby and the mama in the same caseâso cute and cuddly.
You keep the acoustic in standard and use the electrics for alternate tunings?
If I donât have another guitar then I sometimes tune the acoustic but otherwise Iâll keep the electrics tuned to DADGAD or C G C G A E.
And you donât play electric with a pick, either?
That could be fun to try, and I like the sound sometimes. My fingers have little knots on them, and I donât really have nails. Iâm jealous of Dolly [Parton]âher nails, her playing, all of it. My friend Yasmin [Williams] has beautiful nails too and she plays gorgeous acoustic guitar. Sheâs so cool.
I love the question you ask in your song âSuperpowerâ: âHow will I face this day?â So, how are you facing this day that we have today?
Well, I started slowly just kind of lying there for a little bit. And I remembered this teacher I had years ago in yoga, and she said at the end of the class in savasana, âBegin to wiggle your fingers and your toes,â and so I started with just hearing her voice say that as I woke up. I wiggled my fingers and my toes and then took a few breaths then I was like, âOkay, I can open my eyes to this day.â
What She Plays
Valerie Juneâs main acoustic guitar is a Martin 000-15, set up with Martin extra-light strings. For amplification, she uses L.R. Baggs pickups and preamps for her guitars as well as banjo and ukulele. âNZ
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.