Sun June and the Beautiful, Surreal Sustainability of Abstraction

Far from the sparse Western depictions that so many associate with the South, Texas is teeming with a rich history of art. With years of legendary musicians across every genre—Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Janis Joplin, Meat Loaf, Roy Orbison—it is impossible to not be inspired when you step foot in a state with a spectrum of visionary artists as diverse as it is wide. The Texas landscape has plenty to offer its creatives, too, historically and collectively and artistically—and it’s that very magic that led to Laura Colwell and Stephen Salisbury meeting each other in Austin.

Although the Texas transplants eventually bonded over music, that’s not what brought them together in the first place—it was the state capital’s bustling movie industry. Vocalist and songwriter Colwell and guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Salisbury met in the editing room of Terrence Malick’s Song to Song. Then, working as a production assistant and editor, respectively, late nights on the clock turned into joking jam sessions using Ryan Gosling’s guitar to create spoofs of songs like “Where Is My Mind?”—which became “Where Is My Life?” However, their musical endeavors stopped being a joke when the self-proclaimed “regret pop” group started adding new members, with the help of lead guitarist Michael Bain (who met the co-founding duo through a mutual friend). Sun June was pieced together through friends of friends, all of whom came from far-reaching corners of the US—North Carolina, California, New York and Chicago. Bassist Justin Harris and drummer Sarah Schultz (and, later, guitarist and vocalist Santiago Dietche) found the original trio through the spirited melting pot of the Austin music scene, where there was always an instrument within reach and someone to play with.

After playing around the live music capital of the world, in small honky tonks and dive bars, they dropped their first album in 2018, Years—a collection of live-taped songs inspired by those gigs. Then, in a feat of cosmic fate, the group’s sophomore album Somewhere miraculously wrapped in the studio the day Austin became a ghost town in 2020. The group’s third album, Bad Dream Jaguar, is the moody, atmospheric product of pandemic isolation, which required Sun June to learn how to create music together from a distance. Stripped away from the jam sessions of Somewhere and the touring life that conjured Years, Colwell and Salisbury found solace in each other during that period of seclusion—creatively and romantically.

In the spirit of life changes, Salisbury left Austin later in 2020 for North Carolina to pursue a degree in microbiology. However, even 1,300 miles away, he couldn’t help but dream of Texas. “I was missing Austin a lot. So I think there are more songs [on Bad Dream Jaguar] about Texas than I would have written otherwise,” he confesses from his home in North Carolina over Zoom. Rather than fray the six-piece, the distance created a unique remote recording process that allowed Sun June to reinvent their recording- and album-making process. Colwell and Salisbury remained deeply attached, constantly creating together through the intimacy of their relationship. At the same time, their bandmates continued working on music on their own—a necessary piece of getting through an unprecedented time. “The other band members got up to other musical projects, playing in other bands. They got experience with new musicians, which helped re-inspire them,” Salisbury adds. All in perfect timing to begin a new chapter for Sun June, Bad Dream Jaguar.

Because of some artistic neuroses across their first two albums, Sun June was measured and rehearsed, opting for perfection over spontaneity. However, with everyone spread out from each other, that space let the band create more freely the third time around. “I was overwhelmed by it at first. I had difficulty knowing what I was doing outside of the band. It gave me too much space. I was self-conscious about sending my work to the band,” Colwell admits. “I think the distance influenced how we worked together, because we had limited time. And it helped. We weren’t as precious about the music and bringing songs to the band,” she said. “I think it was good for us to be able to throw caution to the wind right as we’re about to record, learn a song or give people a few months to chew on something.”

The band quickly found a new rhythm of sending snippets of ideas back and forth to each other. A melody here, a lyric there, the occasional guitar riff and, even, the help of some outside musicians gave a new layer to the sextet’s sound. For them, this forced separation became an exciting journey of discovery. “Laura and I had some special moments in the studio, when it was just the two of us in North Carolina,” Salisbury says. “We got the best of all worlds. The album has some of the songs we recorded at home together, but we still played in the studio as a band a few times. The difference was that we hadn’t toured the material or practiced it to death. It became the first thought—best thought—which is not normally how we work. We are normally ‘first thought, we hate ourselves.’”

For Colwell and Salisbury, who leaned on each other in songwriting by sharing their work almost instantly during their first two albums, writing lyrics alone became a subconscious therapy. “I was unaware that you [Stephen] were sending a message. I was unaware that I was presenting a message. I think we are always uncertain what the other person is truly writing about, but I thought it was therapeutic to try and push myself to write songs alone,” Colwell says. “Because when I would be around Stephen, I’d immediately have to show him. That put me in a weird, different zone, out of my comfort bubble.” “I definitely think it’s therapeutic,” Salisbury adds. “But it’s probably bad therapy. Maybe cathartic? It’s certainly processing. Sometimes, you don’t realize what you’re writing about until later. Then when you finish the songs together—that was always kind of funny. Laura would propose a line that would make me go, ‘Ouch, that hurts a little bit, but it’s good. Let’s do that!’”

While the songwriting duo wouldn’t commit to saying whether this new process was better or worse than their previous methods, they both admit that they grew from the experience—especially Colwell, who battles her insecurities regarding her art. “I’m still struggling with being my own champion and finishing something just for the sake of finishing it. I’m still dealing with being precious with my work, but being separated helped me to be more comfortable alone. I think it was therapeutic personally to just be like, ‘I don’t always need to be around people, but I really like being around people,’” she continues.

Colwell’s isolation led her to finding solace in the realization that it’s okay to continue growing up, even in your mid-30s. So many of those feelings came up while writing Bad Dream Jaguar, especially the deeply personal story in “Moon Ahead,” with all the hours of reflecting on where she thought she needed to be in life. “I was doing a lot of crisis management modes where I’m comparing myself to what my parents were doing when they were my age and comparing my friends around me who were way ahead of me in terms of stability,” Colwell says. That creeping worry of being behind resulted in her looking back and thinking about what choices led her to where she is now. “I had been thinking about where I grew up in upstate New York. I had a good childhood, but there were aspects of being a child of divorce and having alcoholism around,” she adds. “There’s been a lot of writing about that world. The regrets of drinking. I hadn’t come to terms with that part of growing up.”

Colwell, looking back, didn’t stop at diving into her childhood. She was sentimental for the years when Sun June was just getting started. Memory has always been integral to their songwriting process, but with so much time to sit and think, it became the most symbolic piece of Bad Dream Jaguar. “Like the line in ‘Moon Ahead,’ ‘the moon and the stars above me,’ I was thinking back to when we first started the band. Time, I don’t understand it or how our brains hold on to certain memories. There was something novel about the darkness of it and wanting to think, ‘I’ll unpack that tomorrow,’” she said. “Then you go to bed at night and immediately think, ‘Oh, am I thinking about my childhood home?’ Missing what you had and remembering the good times, but being sad about things you didn’t have closure to, like the house I grew up in was foreclosed on. Something about that ate away at me for whatever reason.”

Through the pain of working through a long-distance relationship—and Colwell working through her past—the two still looked for things in their music that made them laugh or, at least, made them feel a little weird. To them, feeling anything in their music, no matter what that feeling is, is important—because they want to find joy in what they create. “One of the last lines Laura wrote for ‘Moon Ahead’ was ‘I was watching a shadow grow on the bedside before you woke up.’ That’s an image that I keep returning to. It makes me laugh because it means that it’s the afternoon because of the shadows. It’s funny because it doesn’t make sense, but I love it,” Salisbury chuckles.

Some of these absurd ideas come from the stream-of-conscious writing that the pair flow with. Rather than recounting things precisely as they happened, they lean into loose interpretations of memory—almost keeping an abstract journal rather than a traditional one. This comes through strongly in “Easy Violence,” especially with the line “Saw the red sun, low and constant / Everything I’ve done: blue and violet / And I was drunk, staying out too late at the White Horse / Made a couple bad choices.” This piece of the song is the memory represented through the jaguar coming in for the kill. It stalks its way through the album as a constant reminder of our past mistakes that could come back to bite us at any moment. It’s an odd mix of super-specific details combined with a vague idea of who, or what, the song could be referencing. Similar to how we only remember pieces of memories, like a sound or a smell.

Colwell and Salisbury are deeply entranced by the senses and how they can come through in their music—like the cigarettes and Listerine in “Washington Square” or the burning sage in “Sage.” “I like the idea that [the sage] was something weighing on my mind, and ‘How do I visualize what I’m trying to smoke?’” Colwell says. “It was more visual but, when I think about upstate New York, and I think about my mother and her friends and her taking me to the Indian Bell dance classes, really like ‘strap the bells to your ankles and do a dance’—everywhere I went, I’d say there was incense burning.” “I think we’re drawn to film and images in our lyrics because we like the idea of being moved by something we don’t understand,” Salisbury continues. “Similar to if you see a great image in a movie, and you have to unpack why it moved you or affected you. I think that’s what we’re trying to look for when we’re writing, stumbling upon a line that makes us feel weird.”

In the spirit of deeply understanding the strange imagery the duo created on Bad Dream Jaguar, I ask them to create a specific scene, artwork or visual representation that they view the album as. Taking time to ponder this, Salisbury jokes, “I was gonna say laser show.” Colwell chimes in, “Oh yeah, like the Sphere in Vegas, and it’s just the light panels flickering on and off, looking like they’re going to fall on me.” Following their playfully characteristic banter, they gave me their interpretation of the album in an abstract sense: “I guess I envisioned it as sustaining a long argument within a dream,” Salisbury muses. “I think it would need to be some interactive stage performance but not on a stage—you’re out in the elements,” Colwell adds. “Laundry sheets surround you and hang drying on a bright, sunny day. Then, suddenly, there’s a shadow that goes by.” That haunting image perfectly depicts an album riddled with painful memories of the past, fear for the future and the abstract beauty of the landscape that Bad Dream Jaguar encapsulates.