Interview: June Of 44
I feel deeply connected to the UK because the music from there has been so influential to my growing head and I think everyone in our band has UK music that they love deeply.
Having reunited a few years again after a long absence, June Of 44 have recently returned to touring after an even longer absence. It’s been 23 years since the beloved band have played the UK and with dates coming very soon, Gavin Brown caught up with the band’s vocalist / guitarists Sean Meadows and Jeff Mueller in the midst of their dates in Europe to talk about how to her tour has been going, their return to playing live, those long awaited UK dates and the history and return of June Of 44.
E&D: How has your recent tour of Europe gone and what have been some of the highlights that you could share with us?
Sean: Our most recent tour which we just finished in Pæstum, Italy a couple of days ago was really manic, along with everything else these days we had some curveballs thrown at us. I was really proud of everyone working through difficult circumstances to in the end pull off a trip that felt triumphant. We finally played Zagreb which was a show we had to cancel in the 90’s so the energy there was quite remarkable and beautiful. Lovely people with deep heart and soul helped us bring that show to light.
E&D: Have your sets encompassed your entire career?
Sean: They have on this last trip, we are playing pieces from every record and over the last couple of trips we feel we’ve put together a set that spans our creative output and gives an expansive range of ideas that we’ve covered. Some nights felt really sweeping and other nights got a bit blurry. We had some tight timelines and for the most part we hit our marks.
E&D: You’re playing in London and at the Supersonic Festival in July. Are you looking forward to playing over here again?
Sean: Absolutely. There’s been a lot of conversations over the years about the UK, I’ve had some strange things land in my ears from UK musicians, along with some compliments, there’s been a fair share of chatter about how we may have led UK bands astray. I humbly accept a compliment but I guess I bring up the flipside because I’ve always found that amusing. We’ve always thrown ideas together randomly and with varying degrees of ad hoc energy so I can’t imagine anyone thinking they understand what our strategies are. I have no idea how all the music stacked up, we just kept working on it for a time and then we went about our lives and now we’re working on the music again. From my perspective I feel deeply connected to the UK because the music from there has been so influential to my growing head and I think everyone in our band has UK music that they love deeply. We’re freaks, unapologetically, and the musical vibrations emanating from the UK have had a profound impact on our lives as well as our approach to music. Having said that, we’ve never attempted to emulate any of it- I feel we’ve just soaked it in. In totality I think there’s a lot more formative tissue in our interior lives that originates in the UK than might be obvious to someone currently from the UK. We might be the cousins at your family gathering you’d rather not claim as your own.
E&D: You’ve also got a US tour later on in the year. Are you excited to be playing in your home country again?
Sean: After the last few years we’re excited to play music ANYWHERE!
E&D: What is your favourite June Of 44 song to play live?
Sean: That’s a bit impossible for me to answer, sometimes songs lose steam and others gain traction. Our music is hyper transient and never static so If I pick a favourite, I may doom it to oblivion.
E&D: What are some of your favourite places to play around the world and what makes them so special?
Sean: Italy has been exceptionally warm and passionate to and for this band so though we love to play everywhere, it’s impossible not to mention how much love we’ve experienced here over the years. It’s difficult to describe and encapsulate what our most recent experiences here have been like. It’s been truly a gift and a gem to our lives and to our band.
E&D: Have you had thoughts about touring going into next year at all?
Sean: We have ongoing discussions at present for doing so.
E&D: What are your memories of your last shows in the UK?
Sean: There are a dense block of memories. There’s a loft with broken windows in Hackney where we slept on a floor. There’s a thunderous show in Dublin at Wheelin’s that still echoes in my head. We played a show in Glasgow, maybe on our first tour and if I’m not mistaken Mogwai were there…We’ve all played the UK in different bands so there’s a June of 44 UK Folder on the desktop of my mind.
E&D: What are some of your favourite touring memories from back in the day?
Sean: There are so many, anything that made us laugh and we laughed a lot. Making friends, playing music, having bands blow our minds with original music, good food and more laughter.
E&D: What was the impetus behind the band getting back together?
Sean: We were invited to play in Catania, Sicily by Uzeda for their 30th birthday party. I never thought we’d play together again, and then we decided to accept the challenge of potentially falling on our faces. For me personally that show was terrifying, and I have a complicated relationship to fear, so moving through that headspace was profoundly rewarding.
E&D: How does it feel to be back playing with June Of 44 again?
Sean: Challenging, Exhausting, Rewarding.
E&D: Have you had thoughts about any new music for the future at all or is it too soon to say?
Sean: We’ve been working on new music though it isn’t in a presentable place yet. We have a lot of material in an embryonic form, it’s expensive for us to work together because of where we live so it’s been a challenge for us to afford to carve out the space and time to fully develop a new record. We hope to realise new music, it’s escaping me as to what a timeline for it would be.
E&D: You released the Revisionist: Adaptations & Future Histories in the Time of Love and Survival album a couple of years ago. How was the experience of making the album?
Sean: There were a lot of moving parts and it didn’t really stick to the script of what we planned to do. In the end it came together, but we’d set out to make something a bit different but we had very limited means to work with on that project.
E&D: How has the album been received since it came out?
Sean: It came out in 2020 so it felt like it was vacuumed into the cultural void we’re all lost in at present.
E&D: How did it make you feel when people talked about June Of 44 in revered terms years after the band disbanded?
Sean: It’s deeply moving to me that anyone has found value in our music.
E&D: The music of June Of 44 has incorporated experimental jazz to ambient dub to post punk. Was it fun developing these elements of sound into your music?
Sean: Making June of 44 music has always been extraordinarily fun, we’ve had loads of fun.
E&D: Jeff, Have you ever had any thoughts about doing another solo album?
Jeff: I think there may be one being written / in process now! My first from 1999 was such a sketchbook, I’d like to make a record that’s a bit more cohesive and realised. The music I’ve been writing most recently (past 10 years) is pretty different from what we’ve done in June of 44. I’ve worked a lot on my voice and my guitar playing has changed quite a bit – neither are really that great, but, my songwriting as a whole I think has gotten a bit better and tends to prop up my misgivings.
E&D: What are some of your favourite memories of your time with Rodan and Shipping News?
Jeff: With Rodan, the sense of freedom, fearlessness, and total immersion. Much of the early mid-nineties is such a blur, largely because I was so caught up in the experience itself that I kind of lost track on how to tuck it away in some efficient box in my brain. Our BBC Peel Session was a pretty big deal to me. Also, after having fallen in love with so many records on the label, that very first meeting with Corey Rusk and Ed Roche at Touch and Go to discuss our first LP was nuts – all I could think was “…this is actually happening, this is real.”…though it all felt completely unreal. With Shipping News, finding my way back into a collaboration with Jason was really important… The way Rodan had fallen apart a couple years earlier was a little tricky to manage, lots of moving parts and many evolving personalities, it left a fairly significant pit in my creative life. Even with the brisk and satisfying beginnings of June of 44, for which I will always be thankful, the absence of a creative relationship with Jason was disorienting, after all, we’d worked together consistently for 10 years. Somewhat consistently sharing stages with Shannon Wright brought much happiness as did experiencing ATP and Primavera for the first time.
E&D: Going even further back, do you have good memories of King G and the J Krew? Indestructible Songs Of The Humpback Whale is a great album!
Jeff: Whoa! Nice… and, oh man, yes. I argue, sometimes jokingly, sometimes not, that that release is the best thing I’ve / we’ve ever done. Being 15 or 16 years old and having anything to bite down on that gave confidence and felt legit, regardless of how weird or scattered, was pretty useful to Greg, Jon, Jason and I. When we hit 20 and had a slightly better sense of how to organise ourselves… we just went for it. That project pooled so many different musicians into its making – Drew Daniel from Matmos, Ben Daughtery from Love Jones, Tim Furnish from Crain (a vastly underappreciated Louisville band)… and, we’d eventually find our way to Baltimore to finalise the recording, where we worked with Forest French, who went on to record the first Rodan EP. The making of that music was such a tapestry of styles and recording formats – whatever worked and made us happy, that was the right decision. No apprehension – for better or worse! I’m really happy to hear that you like it!
E&D: How did you first discover and get into hip hop and is it still something you listen to and explore?
Jeff: I was young, maybe 9ish, while in 3rd grade forward at a terrifically mixed up school race-wise, that in itself exposed me to much more than my suburban neighbourhood ever could. At home, I can recall my mom listening to a lot of Neil Diamond and Elvis Presley, my Dad was fond of Jimmy Buffet and Dan Fogelberg, my sister loved classic rock like Boston and Led Zeppelin – all of which I endearingly hold close to my human heart. But, at school events and on the bus, kids were blaring Grandmaster Flash, Sugarhill Gang, Kurtis Blow, and Cold Crush Brothers… it woke the hell out of me, I loved it so much. Found myself coming up with really bad rhymes while roaming about or waiting for someone to come home and let me into our house because I’d locked myself out… went off and on like that through middle school. When Jason, Greg and I came together in high school, it wasn’t long before we were knee-deep in recording projects. I listen to all kinds of music, hip hop and rap are still in my mix for sure.
E&D: Have you always been diverse in the music you listen to?
Jeff: I found my way into classical, dub, country, jazz, rap, rock, reggae, even some opera as a younger listener… also tried hard to access as much as I could of the somewhat limited South American and African music in the Louisville record shops of the 90’s. I’m always looking for new things to listen to, Todd from Shipping News was / is really good about sharing music… Doug, Sean and Fred have shown me a lot of records that I really love – none of which are consistent style-wise, always mixed up. Also, I gotta say, I loathe Spotify, I certainly recognise its usefulness in terms of discovery – I just can’t stand the way it treats the artists it hosts. I far and away prefer finding out about new music through friends than through algorithms.
E&D: Who are your biggest influences as a musician?
Jeff: In no particular order: Shannon Wright, Black Sabbath, Will Oldham, Fritz Wotruba, Octavia Butler, Radiohead, Etta James, Leonard Cohen, Willem de Kooning, Neil Young, Portishead, Jane Campion, The Sokol Family, Anthony Bourdain, Nick Cave, Marvin Gaye.
E&D: What have been some of the highlights of your vast musical career thus far and what is left that you still want to achieve?
Jeff: Having the honour of recording records with world class engineers like Bob Weston and David Lenci, those are pretty major highlights. Having carved out any sort of following in countries where, as a kid, I never in my wildest dreams thought there would be an audience for my music, that’s incredibly special. We just returned from Italy after having played a week of beautiful concerts – I’m always a little busted up with gratitude for the way our life works in such places. That any of it works at all is a success in my view, that there is dinner, a PA, and more times than not, a kind-hearted person to handle us and make us comfortable… pretty basic stuff, but it means the world to me. The list is too long in terms of hopeful achievements, I’ll share a few that I think are common amongst us… we’d like to play in Central Park on Manhattan, I’d like to know if Patti Smith received / read the book I wrote and sent her at the beginning of the pandemic (even if she thought it was really bad!), we’d like to record with Mick Harvey, we’d like to tour in South America. We’re really looking forward to playing Supersonic!
