“You keep breaking my heart, Texas,” Sun June lead vocalist Laura Colwell begs on Bad Dream Jaguar‘s penultimate track. “How am I supposed to give you up?“
Well, she hasn’t yet.
Sun June’s dream-pop fiddles with such in-betweener nightmares on the sextet’s third LP, a paired release with local label Keeled Scales and Run for Cover Records. Immediately clear from smoky opener “Eager,” the record wields a darker force, marked by the distance of the band’s primary songwriters.
“For simplicity, let’s just say I moved to North Carolina,” Colwell says to pin down her home base, regardless of the fact that she’s constantly toeing state lines. She points to the sturdy Honda Odyssey that carried her away from partner Stephen Salisbury, co-songwriter and guitarist in Sun June. She’s back in Texas to prepare for East Coast tour dates with Runnner, wrapping with a Nov. 18 Austin show at Parish.
Where 2021’s Somewhere engulfed the couple’s early days living together, their follow-up finds them, like many folks in 2020, isolated. Salisbury moved to North Carolina to pursue a graduate degree in microbiology, and Colwell remained in Texas. Navigating both their relationship and music long distance, the duo sent voice notes back and forth.
“We were left to be alone in our thoughts for the first time,” she says. “We have lived together for many, many years before then, so it was alarming.
“It was hard and weird, but it was an important time for me to shift focus on writing for myself first, rather than thinking that someone’s just going to be there to swoop in and help me write the rest of the song.”
“[It] was an important time for me to shift focus on writing for myself first, rather than thinking that someone’s just going to be there to swoop in and help me write the rest of the song.” – Laura Colwell
Their intertwining minds still seemed to send telepathic signals. When Colwell first heard Salisbury’s lyrics to the woodwind-flourished “Washington Square,” his twentysomething antics and Boston-to-New York ride on the Fung Wah Bus came to her as a shared memory, despite the fact that the pair hadn’t known each other yet. Speaking to Sun June’s ability to pin down a place, Bad Dream Jaguar drips in just-vague-enough imagery to let listeners seep into nostalgia: cigarettes and Listerine. A company car bound to Chicago. The Hudson River. Late-era Neil Young.
More than proof of their penchant for name-drops, the piano ballad “John Prine” revives the late country-folk icon in atmospheric stillness. She muses, “Me and John Prine in the car,” before humming a sweet melody. Drums were intentionally left out.
“It was important to us to have a track that was drumless just for the sake of sitting in something uncomfortably,” Colwell says.
With Salisbury solely appearing on recordings, Santiago Dietche of Austin act Daphne Tunes has filled the hole left in live sets since 2021. Colwell says Dietche naturally broke the mold with a bolder bearing. “He doesn’t operate as Stephen would on guitar, even though he was replacing Stephen. Stephen’s very shy. He doesn’t want to do it live,” Colwell laughs. “He’s too scared to play or something.”
Colwell says her bandmates’ other Austin projects helped usher in Sun June’s new era – namely Daphne Tunes’ loose, plucky strings and drummer Sarah Schultz’s involvement in Pelvis Wrestley. The latter’s Americana art-pop and live energy urged her to lean into Bad Dream Jaguar‘s moody air. “We took as much as they were willing to give,” she said of their sonic palettes, also hinting at a pile of unnamed influences from bassist Justin Harris and lead guitarist Michael Bain.
“[Michael’s] got musicians that he listens to that I’ve never heard of. I am always floored. I have so much to learn.”
As home to the band’s live lineup, Austin still holds Sun June’s pulse, despite its lead songwriters straddling the nation. Released last month, Bad Dream Jaguar is rife with purely Texan references, whether a wild night at the White Horse or unseasonal weather “too hot to stand.”
“Austin has a big place in our hearts, and we realized that more, having left,” Colwell says. “Leaving at a weird time, during the pandemic … it just left us longing to come back. So I’m not ready to fully move.”
This article appears in Best of Austin: Restaurants 2023.