Valerie June

When Valerie June was just six years old and one of five kids in her family growing up outside of Jackson, Tenn., she started to write songs about the wonders of her world—“nature and trees and frogs and rain and stuff like that,” she once put it. June’s household was rich with music; her father, who ran a construction company, moonlit as a promoter, so the kids would run around town, affixing flyers to utility poles. They all sang in the house. When June finished school, she headed 90 minutes west to Memphis, singing in a band, her voice even then like something excavated from an old Appalachian record in Harry Smith’s archive—somehow keening but playful, jubilant but real. When the band broke up, she decided the time had come to learn instruments, too, quickly picking up guitar, banjo, and ukulele. Since her self-released debut in 2006, she has gradually emerged as one of the modern South’s most distinct songwriters.

There has always been a touch of the mystic to June’s music, a down-home Afrofuturism that suggested new ways of seeing the world. It flourished on 2025’s M. Ward-produced Owls, Omens, and Oracles, a radiant record about love and coexistence, sadness and sweetness. “Are you ready to see a world where we could all be free?” she sings at the start of the infectious “Endless Tree,” her voice an instrument of idiosyncratic soul, “As branches of an endless tree?” And on “Calling My Spirit,” an a cappella piece introduced by the hoots of owls, she lands on the line, “Life’s only purpose is to shine.” Mixing soul and country, hip-hop and gospel, June’s music is a distillation of Southern sounds that points to a future where anything may be possible—kindness, joy, even redemption.