2013 has really been a pretty fantastic year for music, especially for those of us who tend towards the soulful. Hailing from right around where my people come from in West Tennessee, Valerie June has made a welcome addition to an already packed year of great music. Her album (essentially her third or fourth release under her own name, but her first for a proper label, thus the reason everyone seems to think this is her debut, not to mention her time in the group Bella Sun), Pushin’ Against A Stone separates itself from a field of other “retro” styled artists in it’s complexity and diversity. Stone could just focus on the blues, or just focus on soul, or just focus on folksy roots music, but instead she’s put it all together in a fairly stunning manner, with a little help from Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. “Working Woman Blues,” and “Can’t Be Told” are strong singles, but to me the most exceptional song on the album is “Shotgun.” It’s remarkable simply because it’s so rare to hear a murder ballad where the woman is not only the narrator but also not the victim. It’s sung in a way that you could almost be forgiven for not recognizing that she kills this man with a saw-off shotgun at the end, but that’s a testament to her talents as a singer and songwriter. Recently she did an interview with NPR and said this about how the song came to her:
“I was seeing this field, this prairie in the middle of America, I guess. The wheat was over-my-head high, almost, and it was blowing back and forth. And there was this old house with white vinyl siding — almost falling off, like a haunted house — and a screen door, and it was flapping in the wind. There’s a song [the blues standard ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’] that goes, ‘Baby, please don’t go / Don’t go down to New Orleans.’ Well, this woman, she was like, ‘No, don’t go! Don’t leave me! Don’t go down to New Orleans!’ And the man had other ideas for what he wanted to do. So she decided that she was upset about it, and she wanted to get her sawed-off shotgun and do something with the relationship that was gonna make him hers forever.”
Hopefully we’ll get much more to come from Ms. June, and you should count yourself very lucky indeed if you get to see her perform in person (which there are a few chances to do so here in LA this week, including a free show at Amoeba on Thursday and her sold-out performance (which KPFK is presenting) at the Bootleg Theater on Friday, with yours truly spinning tunes between the sets.