Valerie June is a captivating study in contrast and seeming contradictions. The Tennessee-based singer-songwriter-friendly-sorceress is both earthy and ethereal. She is in command of her musical voice and overall unique persona, while also embracing rawness and vulnerability. She is simultaneously rootsy-retro and modern, and generally rough and ready.
All of these delicious dualities poured onto the Lobero stage when June gave a packed audience what they came for on Sunday night as part of her tour promoting her stirring new album Owls, Omens and Oracles. She transformed that stage on arrival, with her big bouncing pile of hair, shimmery gold top, and bright red skirt, a locked-in groove machine of a five-piece band and her personal wonder cabinet of songs to sing and sling.
June, whose career goes back twenty years and has grown from cult status to the stuff of a Grammy award and appearances in major media spotlights, has built up a rich catalog of originals. Genre-wise, she plays a field of her choosing, touching on plenty of rock solid historical nodal points, from splinkety rockabilly to Little Richard–like rock ‘n’ soul vamps, Lightnin’ Hopkins’s bluesy loam (this concert’s cover of Hopkins’s “Life I Used to Live”) and tapping into such personal career highlights as her critically acclaimed 2017 album The Order of Time (which, incidentally, even crusty Bob Dylan was a fan of).
As for local connections, June played at the Santa Barbara Bowl in 2016, opening for Norah Jones, and her raw goodness — including some loose intonation moments, part of her unique style — seemed somewhat lost on the warm cozies–seeking fans of Jones. All these years later, Valerie June commands a large and expanding fan base. No doubt, her Lobero show helped expand that base further in these parts.
Special kudos and attention goes out to the show’s opener, the fascinating Irish singer-songwriter Mick Flannery. His darkly witty and literate lyrics and flexible vocal powers kept us in thrall, along with a refreshingly unexpected terrain of song subjects, including his family background of atheists, a moving song written from the perspective of a disappointed older woman, and an ode to his job-hating bartender friend, whose job is “pouring water into a lifeboat.” With touches of Tom Waits and other melancholic song bards, Flannery needs to be heard on a wider basis.
On Sunday, the Lobero stage was duly set for the magic, with strings of lights wending through flowery accoutrements, enigmatic imagery, and the sense of a mystical roadhouse ambience perfectly suiting her sound and presence. At times, the sound and energy was too intense for the room, and the sound mix got overly loud and muddy. But those moments also contained the disarming side effect of the music seemingly bursting through the seams and exceeding allowable voltage.
Not that all was in-your-face, by any means. June shifts easily from the blues and rock turf to shades of country and bluegrass, as demonstrated on her country waltz “If And” and the beloved ballad “Astral Plane” (both from The Order of Time). On one of her mystical moments of between-song riffing, June spun a tale of being graciously given a song by a fairy dust–sprinkling muse before launching into the lilting country-fried song “Love and Let Go,” the finale of her new album.
Also from that album, she drew directly on vintage pop style modes for the Phil Spector–ish “All I Really Wanna Do” and the rugged shuffle of “Joy, Joy!” As she told the crowd, by way of a mantra, “your joy can never be taken.”
Come encore time, June unveiled the author-poet within, with three books to her name so far. Her affirmative poem “The Highs and Lows”, segued into a cover of Freddie Hart’s “Drink Up and Go Home.” By way of a kindly fare-thee-well to the audience, June said, “thank you for believing in magic, fairies, and freaky black chicks like me.” It’s fair to say the Lobero was a house teeming with believers that night.