When Valerie June came back through Louisville, she didn’t arrive with the posture of someone riding momentum. She showed up like someone tending a garden—checking the soil, watching the light, trusting that whatever’s growing will reveal itself in its own time.
That idea runs straight through The Order of Time, an album she talked about less like a release and more like a process. “When you’re on the journey toward a dream,” she said, “you always think, ‘I want it now.’ But the order of time is dealing with how long it actually takes to manifest something beautiful.”
Between tours, June didn’t exactly slow down—she just shifted her focus. “I started a great jungle in my apartment in New York,” she said, laughing. “Big bay windows, perfect sun. I can grow pretty much every kind of plant I love.” One survivor earned a special title. “I have one plant I call ‘The Only One,’ because it’s the only one that made it through my two hundred dates a year for two years. Now it’s so full and beautiful.”
That attention to growth—quiet, deliberate, patient—mirrors the way she talks about songwriting. “Songs are the best way I’ve found to take emotions and bottle them and give them to the world,” she said. “I like to paint, I like to dance, but songs are the easiest way for me.”
Take “Astral Plane,” a song that floated through the room like a benediction. “It has a lot of light in it,” June explained. “It reminds me that I have an inner light I need to shine. Everybody’s light is different. We need all the different colors and shades.”
She didn’t frame that as self-help philosophy—it came across more like lived observation. “Sometimes we get doubtful and think, ‘Maybe I won’t shine so bright today,’” she said, before invoking Sharon Jones, who toured while battling cancer. “She never let the crowd see it. She just shined every day.”
That balance—acknowledging hardship without letting it dominate—threads through the record. “The album deals with all the human emotions you go through on the road toward a dream,” June said. “You’ve got to have patience.”
Interestingly, the record didn’t start with a concept. That came later. “I sent Matt Marinelli about a hundred songs,” she said. “He made a list of twenty he liked. I made a list of twenty I absolutely had to record. Then we put them side by side.” The overlap became the spine of the album; the rest required negotiation. “We fought a little,” she admitted. “But then we decided—these are the ones.”
The songs that didn’t make the cut didn’t feel discarded to her. “They’ll find their way,” she said. “Songs are like children. You give them everything when they’re little, but then you have to let them go.” Sometimes they reappear in unexpected places—like when Mavis Staples recorded June’s “High Note” and named her album after it. “I didn’t write it for her,” June said. “She just asked for something positive, and that’s the one that wanted to go.”
Some songs, though, are never meant to leave home. “I wrote a lullaby years ago,” she said. “That song isn’t for everybody. It’s advice for a child I might one day have.” She said it without sentimentality, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Family plays a visible role throughout The Order of Time. Both of her brothers sing on the record, and her late father’s presence looms warmly in its spirit. She traced it back to a Carnegie Hall show where her family joined her onstage. “My dad walked right up to the front and started dancing,” she said. “Everyone else was seated. I told security, ‘Don’t mess with him. Let him dance.’” That moment stayed with her. “I wanted to put that magic on the record.”
Even with collaborators like Norah Jones and a deep bench of musicians and arrangers, June keeps returning to the same image: something pulled from the ether and made physical. “That’s why I followed this dream,” she said. “To learn how to take something intangible and bring it to earth. That process—that’s the order of time.”
Watching her perform, that philosophy doesn’t feel theoretical. It feels practiced. Unrushed. Rooted. Like someone who knows that growth can’t be forced, only tended.
And catch this earlier interview with Valerie and Kyle from ACL Fest in 2013.
