With blend of influences, Valerie June stands on her own
From the Cape Cod Times, Aug. 22, 2014
NORTH TRURO — “Minnie Pearl meets Diana Ross,” said Kathy.
“That’s funny. I was thinking Macy Gray meets Dolly Parton,” I said.
“How about Tracy Chapman meets Zooey Deschanel?” asked Tracy.
We’d just seen Valerie June’s eccentric talent and personality on display at the Payomet Performing Arts Center. Add up our summaries and we had her pretty well captured.
June’s 2013 CD, “Pushin’ Against a Stone,” was one of the year’s best. On the disc, Tennessee-born June sounds like an Appalachian Macy Gray on one song, a ’60s girls group on another and Alison Krauss on another. It’s rock-solid stuff.
On that debut CD, June got some help from legendary keyboard player Booker T. Jones and guitarist Dan Auerbach of the blues-rock duo the Black Keys, among others. In her show Wednesday night, she was on her own, except for her guitar, her banjo and her “baby,” a banjo ukulele.
June describes her mixture of country, folk, blues, rock and soul as “organic moonshine roots music.” She added some country flavor to the traditional gospel song “This World Is Not My Home.” She sang her own “Rain Dance” as a twangy scat song, accompanied by some jangly guitar.
On the blues chestnut “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” her banjo strumming picked up speed, like a train accelerating on a downhill track. On other songs, including “Workin’ Woman Blues,” she attacked her guitar strings with the ferocity of folk-punk player Ani DiFranco. At the end of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me,” she coaxed the (willing) crowd into a sing-along.
Her vocals were served up with a mix of Memphis twang and old bluesman growl that sometimes made it hard to decipher the lyrics, but the emotions came through. You get the sense that June is still exploring the songs and not just churning them out the same way every night.
June played 16 songs, some of them barely two minutes long, during her 85-minute show, filling the rest of the time with stories, talking about cooking in her apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn or scribbling down notes in the blank back pages of a novel when some song lyrics came to her in the middle of the night.
She said her CD title, “Pushin’ Against a Stone,” was a tribute to those who’d helped her along the way. “The more you go up the hill, the more dust that stone gathers. You push it a lot and it rolls back. You get people helping you, you get all these hands, and you end up rolling it pretty good.”
June wore spangly sandals, a blue polka-dotted skirt and a red leather jacket, with her massive dreadlocks in a gravity-defying tower. Lifting the banjo strap over her hair is “the hardest part of the day,” she said. “When you like your job and your hair, you just roll with it.”
June has too much energy to release it all through her vocals and strings. She finished one song with a short rooster-strut dance step. On another, she sat on a stool but kicked one or both legs while she played guitar.
Two-thirds of the way through the show, it struck me that June is a wiser, music-world version of the movies’ manic pixie dream-girl character, with her eccentric, at times girlish personality (think Deschanel in “500 Days of Summer”). Time spent with June is time well spent.