Established in 1998, June Star has been lingering around in the Baltimore area. After ten years of bar gigs and small album releases, Andrew decided it was time shake up the format and head in a newish type of direction. June Star is now shared band between Grimm and Timothy Bracken. Timothy has been an absolute integral member of the band for nine years and it is this past year his songs have been included in the live sets and now their most recent release, Shift, Engage and Initiate, as well as the longer form, Love, Honor, and Negotiate. The soundscape of June Star has also expanded to include Patrick Hughes(drums), Mike Ward (keyboards) and Burke Sampson (guitar).
During its tenure June Star has released six discs: June Star (1998) Songs From an Engineer's Daughter (2000), Telegraph (2001), and Sugarbird (2004), Cora Belle (2008), and Shift, Engage, and Initiate (2009).
June Star writes songs about loss like Russian novelists write about cold. While each song may not mention it explicitly, loss pervades the landscape, tugging at your clothes, weighing on your shoulders, creeping into your bones. On their new release, Northern Meridian, June Star continues to map the genome of loss. But it is not a map of the world shown here; rather, it is the local intimate map of your own breakups and heartaches. Perhaps it is your old neighborhood or the backstreets around your high school or college – wherever it is where you first encountered what the poet John Berryman calls “the epistemology of loss.” Regardless, you know its back alleys and shortcuts, its hangouts and its lonesome places as well as you know the sound of your own voice. This disc catches you up short, surprising you with how these places can still shock you back into those places, and how much it still stings. June Star draws these places out, not in the adolescent palette of rock n roll rage, but rather with the deliberative shades and adult muse of the best country music. Like first loss, and really every one after, it is a densely layered & textured affair.
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