On October 16, the June McDoom debut Album “Follow The Light” is out via Jagjaguwar.
June grew up in a Jamaican household in South Florida, an existence built of strong extended family, communal care, bass and harmonics. Her father built his own speakers and the bass from his DJ sets would sneak its way through her bedroom floor, as she listened to folk records, finding harmonies that were new and special to her. She would find folk music on her own, and did not mind being the only one listening to folk; the solitude afforded her the opportunity to fall in love with harmony first, before words, before anything else.
Yet and still, her grandfather, Colin Smith, was a distinguished Mento man who played banjo and guitar, built his own rumba boxes and worked hard to keep Jamaica’s oldest form of rural acoustic folk music and storytelling alive. And he is the one who put a guitar in her hands. An inheritance, a gift and a map.
As June layers these songs, this record, she is figuring out who she is in real time.
