Valerie June breaks through the grind of life with her innovative album ‘Owls, omens, and oracles’

GRAMMY-nominated singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Valerie June releases her new album, Owls, Omens, and Oracles. Rooted in the belief that what we focus on is what we manifest, June dreams a songpath forward with Owls, Omens, and Oracles that leaves no one behind. Halfway through a decade of immense and rapid global change, June asserts a multidimensional Blackness steeped in laughter, truth, magic, delight, and interdependence. This album is a radical statement to break skepticism, surveillance, and doom scrolling – let yourself celebrate your aliveness. Connect, weep, change, open.

June has been softening and clarifying her sound since the 2013 release of Pushin' Against A Stone, through The Order of Time, The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, and Under Cover. “A willed and unblinking optimism courses through Valerie June’s songs” (New York Times); this newest work shows her own spiritual growth and the opening of ancestral channels into both her dynamic and distinct voice and her tender lyrics. June is not alone in crafting this sacred field for the contemplation of love and being human. Produced by M. Ward (Mavis Staples, She & Him) and engineered by Pierre de Reeder (Rilo Kiley, Jenny Lewis), Owls, Omens, and Oracles also features a cast of contributors, including The Blind Boys of Alabama and Norah Jones.

Owls, Omens, and Oracles is expansive, growing from June’s psychedelic folk, indie rock, Appalachian, bluegrass, country soul, orchestral pop, and blues root system into an intergalactic web of wisdom. Every single note she sings is dusted with her “unorthodox, howling tin-pan of a voice” (ELLE), “like raw silk–intimate, elegant and strong” (Garden & Gun). The visceral twists and fierce raw emotion of her voice threads textures and tones through the needle of a multi-genre American quilt. Gracefulness and gentleness harmonize with edginess and precarity, evoking a tenderness within even the hardest heart as June holds the complexity of "My life is a country song," and "I am multidimensional, beyond category."