Valerie June gave us a totally de-Auerbach-ized performance at Amoeba on Thursday night. I am just saying this because her album ‘Pushin’ Against A Stone’ is produced by the Black Keys frontman and the only song I had heard of her, ‘You Can’t Be Told’ (the Starbucks song) sounded very much like the Black Keys owns. But instead the instrumental bombast of Auerbach, she played an intimate and fierce set, looking like a bluesy-queen with her medusa of dreadlocks running around her face. ‘I love your hair’, said someone at the end of the show, and Valerie became suddenly talkative, mentioning she had seen lots of great hair in Los Angeles, whereas she had been very quiet and super focused on her music since the beginning of the show.
Wearing red cowboy boots, a western shirt over her black dress and keeping her oversized red sunglasses during the whole time, she played a few of her Appalachian-blues-folk song, letting down her acoustic guitar to use banjos of different sizes, while working a tambourine with her left foot. But her voice was the main attraction, a high-pitch, nasal, powerful and vibrant instrument, going from quiet-low to stormy-loud, covering the banjo sound as her hand was nervously floating over the strings and her dreadlocks were covering her face.
‘Where are you from?’ shouted someone,… ‘I’m from elsewhere’ she simply answered. She was speaking with a southern accent, and singing like an African Dylan, less interested by sounding beautiful than real, evoking Billie Holiday via Dolly Parton, humming in ‘Twined and Twisted’ like people do in tribal chants, being melancholic and plaintive on ‘Somebody to Love’. Born in Tennessee, she seemed to be a mix of elegance and style (just look at her on the cover of her album!) with deep rural roots, confusing eras, genres and races, singing like a poor white man living in Tennessee, while holding this crown of majestic dreadlocks on the cover of fashion magazines. ‘I ain’t fit to be no mother … I’ve been workin’ all my life’ she sang in ‘Workin’ Woman Blues’, the third song of her set, which sounded more animated and syncopated than the previous ones, and triggered a warm response from the crowd.
She had a show at the Bootleg Theater (not Bar, big difference!) the next night, and nobody should be surprised it instantaneously sold out, as she is already a star in the UK, since her appearance on ‘Later… with Jools Holland’. So is she a big voice we have to count on in the future? One thing is sure, alone on this stage, she looked fiercely independent, and anything I have read about her proves that she is: many labels were interested when she decided to record a studio album, but instead she launched a Kickstarter campaign. So how did she end up working with Dan Auerbach? Producer Kevin Augunas connected her to him: ‘The intention was to meet him and write some songs’, she explained in an interview, ’Songwriting can be like going on a blind date, you don’t know what’s going to happen, but when we got in the room together, we were on the same page. We really got each other. After two sessions, he said, ‘My studio’s about to be finished if you want to record some of these and your own.’ The music always tells me what to do, and I knew I needed to capture those songs there and then. I had to read the signs.’ However, Valerie June was surely reading her own signs as I didn’t think one minute about the Black Keys while she was performing. Despite the multiple comparisons (I have even read some Erykah Badu and Joni Mitchell ones!) her voice sounded unique and bold, her virtuosic style was deeply anchored in root-country-blues and able to make a bridge between many genres, while her hair was sparking all the questions.
