When Valerie June sat down with Reverb last year, the Tennessean songstress talked about how important her voice is to her songwriting. After first struggling to learn to play guitar, she found her way by picking and strumming the chords that could accompany the vocal melodies pouring, fully formed, from her head.
"I can follow the voice and play by ear with the voice, but not with anything else. I can’t just sit with any instrument and match the sound to another instrument. I don’t hear that way, I only hear it through voices," she said.
With Dan Auerbach serving as a producer for her breakout album, Pushin' Against a Stone, and guest artists like Memphis Soul great Booker T. Jones rounding out the backing band, her skeletal songs came to life with full arrangements. Her latest, The Order of Time, continues to marry her soulful folk and country songs with modern production and instrumentation. But it's in her stripped-down solo sets that you can really hear her voice-first artistry.
In a special performance at the Reverb studio, Valerie June treated us to an unreleased song, "Love Me Any Old Way." It’s a spare country tune she says is about "how we look at love and we say, ‘I’m gonna shape love into this thing that I want it to be,’ but then maybe settling down into the place of ‘As long as I’m loved, I don’t have to shape it—just be grateful I got it, in one little way or another.'"
Check out the full performance above. Valerie June’s critically acclaimed album The Order of Time is out now. For more information on her music and tour dates, check out her website, or her Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages.