In town for a show at the State Theatre in Minneapolis, singer-songwriter Valerie June visited The Current studio to play solo acoustic versions of songs from her recent album, Owls, Omens and Oracles.

Afterwards, June sat down with The Current’s Mac Wilson to talk about the album and also to share her joyful spirit. “No matter what hard times we face, no matter what difficulties, challenges, we can create this beautiful world for others to appreciate long after we're gone,” June says. “And I think that's the goal.”

Watch the music performances using the video player above, and below, watch and listen to the video. Beneath the interview video, you’ll find a full transcript of Valerie and Mac’s conversation.

Interview Transcript

Mac Wilson: Hello. I'm Mac Wilson, and I am joined in The Current studio by the one and only Valerie June. Welcome back, Valerie.

Valerie June: Thanks for having me. It's good to see you.

Mac Wilson: So this is nice because there's a song in your catalog called "Smile." Did you know that today is National Smile Day?

Valerie June: Whoa! I had no idea.

Mac Wilson: I should have told you that ahead of time so you could have played it. But, I mean, that's something to keep in mind when you're in town for the show tonight.

Valerie June: Yeah, for sure. Wow!

Mac Wilson: But a smile, that's something that always comes to mind, listening to your music and conversing with you. It's been a while since last time we chatted, so it's good to have you back in.

Valerie June: Yes, it's good to see you, Mac. I think we're doing great.

Mac Wilson: So given that everything that you've been up to lately, Valerie, I was going through your catalog, like, "OK, what are we going to talk about with the new record?" and everything. And I was getting ready for work today, and of all things, the song that popped in my head was "Friendship," the Pops Staples song, the one that you did with Carla Thomas and the Stax Music Academy. And I actually went to do some research on that song. So that's a song that Pops did fairly close to the end of his own life. It's not a really well-known song, so I'm curious, like, how that came into your orbit?

Valerie June: Well, Mavis turned 85, and Carla is a little bit younger than Mavis; 81, I believe. And they met, you know, when Carla was 11 and Mavis was around 13, and they had a friendship and an appreciation for each other through the years, and I thought for Mavis' 85th birthday, it would be really sweet as a gift from Memphis and from Stax, if I had the students perform, because they're all so talented. They play instruments, like, better than most bands that I know; like 10 years old and 15 years old, they're playing these instruments, so I have the students be the backing band, and have Carla sing with me on a song like "Friendship" just as a treat to say, "Mavis, we love you and we appreciate you in this world, and the friendship that y'all have together," but also the friendship she gives to everybody. Because I don't know if you've seen Mavis perform, but if you have, you know she brings joy, she lifts people, and she doesn't stop, and she's been going since she was really young!

Mac Wilson: Right! That's another one that I revisited lately, the one that you did with Mavis, "High Note," that you did a couple years back. Is that the first time that you worked with M. Ward?

Valerie June: It was, yeah! And it's also the first time I worked with Mavis. That's when I met her.

Mac Wilson: So that is the beginning of your relationship with Mavis?

Valerie June: Yeah!

Mac Wilson: Wow, that's so cool. I was going back and looking at the folks who she collaborated with on that one.

Valerie June: Oh, yeah. Neko Case.

Mac Wilson: Great list of people. So Matt Ward, he joined you again on the new record, Owls, Omens and Oracles. He seems — for as wonderful as his catalog is — he seems very adept at working with people and getting them to sound however they want to sound in the studio. That's my impression of him. How was your experience with Matt?

Valerie June: It was so amazing to get to work with him and be a fan, too, because I love his music. When I was working at cafes in Memphis, if "Helicopter" or any of his songs came on, I was like, "Ah! I gotta stop making this latte, that's M. Ward!" And so I just totally would freak out every time I heard any of his songs come on the radio. And that happened basically for a decade before I met him through Mavis. And then I saw him at Newport Folk Festival and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, and we'd be backstage, and I'd say, "We gotta work together on something." And he was open to it. So to go into the studio with him, and I'm sitting here thinking, "OK, he plays guitar, and he has an amazing voice, and he works with all these people who have very interesting characters that I love," but when we got in the studio, I didn't realize he played keys, he plays drums, he plays marimba, he plays every single instrument there is. So it was really cool to work with him and be like, "Wow!" I felt free to share whatever talent I have, because he was going around the room and like, just dabbling in many different instruments, too. So there was no rules to what we could do. It was just have fun, you know?

Mac Wilson: So a few weeks back, around the release of the new record, Owls, Omens and Oracles, you shared some anecdotes behind the making of the record for an on-air listening party. And I was going back and revisiting that, and there's a quote in there that I remember, it struck me at the time, it's when you said, "We have to think about what type of ancestors we want to be" to the other people. And it totally made me rethink about the way that we sit in life. You know, you're used to thinking backwards. You don't really think forward that much. That was just a remarkably profound piece for that to be one of the motifs of the record: What type of ancestors do we want to be?

Valerie June: Well, there was an Indigenous leader at one of the summits that I was on for a university, and he was saying that in his community, as an elder, he was taught when he was young that that was the responsibility, that you think of what you're gonna leave for the seven generations that come behind you. And I was like, "Wow, OK, well, I'm an African American person born in the South, and what were my ancestors doing?" And I know what they were doing. They were experiencing hard times. And I sit here joyful and free and in this gorgeous world and on this marvelous planet, dreaming my dreams and living like a fairy queen, and I come to open the doors for all who come after me, just like they did. No matter what hard times we face, no matter what difficulties, challenges, we can create this beautiful world for others to appreciate long after we're gone. And I think that's the goal. That's what we have to be focused on trying to do. There's absolutely no time to think about anything but creating that beautiful world for others, you know?

Mac Wilson: Which is interesting, because the number of conversations — like interviews, just like this with other musicians — a lot of the time, you find the conversation being like, "OK, so how do you find joy in everyday life?" And you're providing the joy right there. Like, you've got it all figured out right now. It seems that being able to take that perspective, to allow that space, not just space for joy, but like prioritizing it in life. So that's refreshing and heartening. I think that's just the sentiment I need today, which is totally the idea I get from your new record as well.

Valerie June: Thank you. I just, you know, I'm learning from those who've come before, like an artist like Mavis, even, who marched with Dr. King and experienced what it was like, you know, even not that long ago, not as long ago as the ancestors, but in her youth, they were on the streets, and they were paving the way for this beautiful dream that we're still hoping to see come true for all people. And so when I have such amazing elders as Carla, Booker T Jones, Mavis, then I'm like, "OK, I gotta step up. What am I doing?" How can I be one of those people, like Willie Nelson even, or Neil Young? They're all like on the front lines of musically opening people's minds to beauty and to joy and to magical things. And even around the time of the release of my record, Bon Iver released a record, and I heard some interviews where he's talking about joy, and I'm like, "OK! I'm not the only one!"

You know, there's so many of us who are like trying to shift people toward brighter things, because if that's what we are focused on, then I like to think that's what we're manifesting. That's how I got from working at a cafe and cleaning houses and sharing the dream of music is that I focused, every day, 10 minutes, just a little bit, on what I wanted it to look like, you know? And so, two decades later, it don't come easy. Dr. King passed for it, and we still pushing for it. So it could be years. But you focus on it, and it begins to happen. And if not for your lifetime, then for those that are following, you know? And so the record is songs that kind of keep us tuned, like we tune an instrument before we sing. They are songs to try to keep us tuned to love, to joy, to experiencing darkness and being OK with it, not trying to get rid of it, but sitting with it if we need to, and then just moving that energy around so we can push toward brighter days. 

Mac Wilson: We're here in The Current studio with Valerie June. This is going to be the first and only time I ever compare myself to Martin Luther King, but he was assassinated when he was, like, 39 or 40. I want to say he was around that age, and I just turned 41, and that's one of those things where you look back in your life, you're like, "Wow, I'm older than Dr. King was when he achieved everything that he did in his all too brief life." And it actually, literally, made me go back and look at myself and be like, "Wow, that's a little bit of perspective." And as you said, Valerie, all of this is a surprising amount of history that has happened within our lifetimes. Like this is not hundreds of years ago; this is decades ago. And as we look to what's going on now in America years from now, it may seem like a long time, but it is really all tied together, really close, isn't it? 

Valerie June: It's so close. It's like a blink of an eye close. In a blink of an eye, and I'm sitting here 43, and around me are 39-, 40-year-olds, and we are the ones now. When people are talking about politics and where we're going and what the world could look like, we actually are the ones that have the energy force to make this world what it should be. And so, like, it used to be, like, growing up, you look at those who are a little older like, "Well, they're gonna figure it out for us, right?" But no, we are those ones who are supposed to be figuring it out for them — for the older people, for the elders who are struggling and worried about their Social Security and their life and how they're gonna eat and how they're gonna survive. And for the younger ones who are coming up. This age — 30s, 40s, 50s — is so powerful and important. So we got to tune ourselves, you know, to what we want the world to look like, because this is our time, like, in the same sense that Dr. King passed in his time, like, this is the time. You know. It's it. We're responsible.

Mac Wilson: We're here with Valerie June, and you've told the story behind the title of the record on other occasions, but I want to go back to it, because all conversations that I do have to come back to birds, one way or the other. Owls. So this is inspired by an actual owl that you saw, evidently, out in your yard, like pretty much every day for a long time. So tell us a little bit more about this owl and how this returning creature impacted your record.

Valerie June: Well, the land we've lived on for 30 years, we didn't have owls. We only heard them. Like, I never saw an owl. I saw everything. I saw lizards and muskrats and frogs and all kinds of critters. Snakes. But there were no owls. I could hear "hoo-hoo! Hoo-hoo!" Calling, calling, calling. But one morning I woke up, and this was in the last year-and-a-half when I was working with M. Ward on the record, and I would go and I'd have my tea, and I went down one day, and an owl was on the other side of the pond, and it was looking in at me from the window, and I was looking out at it, and I was like, "Oh my god, that's an owl!" And so I'm drinking my tea, I'm like, "Don't move. Don't move." Because if I move sometimes, like the birds that I see, like a great blue heron or a hawk, they'll move. They'll leave. And so I was just really still. And the owl stayed until I finished my tea, and then I saw it two more times over the course of that year-and-a-half, and I was like, "Three times I've seen the owl. What does it mean?" And so I went over to my big box of hippie books, and I was like, "Owl, owl, owl, owl, owl. What does owl mean?" And everyone had the same kind of sentiment and message, which was that owls see through darkness, that they represent mystery. They also represent a dying, so maybe letting go of something that you might not need. But also seeing the brighter times, because they have excellent nocturnal vision. And they're also wise. They're wise. Owls are so wise. And so knowing that, I just was like, "This is what the owl is trying to tell me. It's trying to give me the message of seeing through dark times." And that's what it did.

Mac Wilson: Omens, definitely something to go back to. It's like, I'm not a particularly spiritual person at all, but omens, that's something that really sticks with me. When an omen really wants to be seen, it'll let you know about it. And I think that the owl was probably a similar one for you, and it's something that we can watch out for in our own lives.

Valerie June: Absolutely. Owls and anything that is a positive omen for you, you kind of need it in the world, because it's so easy to be where we're constantly pulled and told what's not going right and what bad news is happening. So why not see something that keeps us tuned to something that is going right, that is something beautiful, that is something sweet? And that might be a rainbow. It might be, like, maybe it's a frog for you. Maybe it's a butterfly. I don't know what it is. It's different for everybody. So whatever the omen is, is what signs come to your life. You know?

Mac Wilson: Valerie June, thank you for stopping by The Current today. Looking forward to having you back soon.

Valerie June: Thank you, Mac.

Mac Wilson: Thank you.

Valerie June: Yeah!

Gallery: Valerie June in studio

Fullscreen SlideshowPrevious Slide

4 of 4

1 of 4

2 of 4

Next Slide

Songs Performed

00:00:00 All I Really Wanna Do
00:02:46 Endless Tree
00:06:45 Love Me Any Ole Way

All songs from Valerie June’s 2025 album, Owls, Omens and Oracles, available on Fantasy Records. 

Musician

Valerie June – vocals, guitar

Credits

Guest – Valerie June
Host – Mac Wilson
Producer – Derrick Stevens
Video – Cameron Wiley, Ruben Schneiderman
Audio – Eric Xu Romani
Graphics – Natalia Toledo
Digital Producer – Luke Taylor

External Link

Valerie June – official site