Valerie June – Astral Plane
2016 · Directed by Jose Lun
9.3K Likes
Best comments
1.“First weekend I spent with my girlfriend, this song played on her Pandora. We got a hotel room, and it was the first time we got to really experience each other. The hotel ended up having bedbugs, lol... but it was one of the best weekends I've ever had.”
More comments
- 2.“I told my daughter to plant me a tree in my spot at the cemetery – a plaque instead of a headstone – with a motion detector that plays this song when it goes off.”
The story
Astral Plane almost belonged to Massive Attack. The Bristol group sent Valerie June a track and asked her to write over it. She came up with the vocal while cooking, sent back a rough demo, and they passed. So the Memphis songwriter rebuilt it on acoustic guitar and kept it for herself.
Good call. It became one of the lead singles from her album The Order of Time, produced by Matt Marinelli, with organ, pedal steel and horns drifting around that voice. The Guardian heard echoes of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. June has said the meaning keeps shifting on her, and she's still working out what it is.
The video, directed and animated by Jose Lun for the production company dreambear, is stitched together from Creative Commons footage: a helix nebula, a supernova, night skies over Norway's Lofoten islands, spring in the Austrian Alps, flowers opening in timelapse, even mold growing under a microscope. Outer space and a petri dish in the same three minutes. That's about right for her.
