02 Mar WBUR: Review: Valerie June, ‘The Order Of Time’
“As of this writing, I am sixty-one years old in chronology,” the novelist Madeleine L’Engle once mused. “But I am not an isolated, chronological numerical statistic. I am sixty-one, and I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thirty-one, and forty-five, and… and… and…”
It’s not entirely surprising that the author of the beloved YA fantasy A Wrinkle in Time would have had such imaginative notions of how past and present fold into each other: “If we lose any part of ourselves,” she concluded, “we are thereby diminished. If I cannot be thirteen and sixty-one simultaneously, part of me has been taken away.”
But it’s not easy to live out that awareness. Valerie June recognizes that treating time as an immutable constant that can also be toyed with, made to telescope, eddy or unfurl in one’s mind, requires a certain willfulness. She puts that esoteric wisdom to captivating use on her new album, The Order of Time, the long-awaited follow up to Pushin’ Against a Stone, which introduced her singularly expansive vision of roots music to audiences across Europe and the U.S. Read more here.
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