Mia June / Don’t Forget Your Bags CD

Mia June 'Don’t Forget Your Bags' CD

“Like many writers, I am mostly inspired by love–the formation and deterioration of it, and the process of discovering who I am through relationships, romantic or otherwise,” says Mia June, the 19-year-old singer/songwriter behind 2023’s Don’t Forget Your Bags. Her songs reach into the unconscious with this recurring theme: how the people we love come with us across the bridge between adolescence and adulthood–that precarious, tender, easy-to-bruise time of launch or perceived failure, when we are judged so often and harshly–shaping us by showing us who we are and who we are not.

Don’t Forget Your Bags is a symbol or a pun; the “bags” of the title are, of course, June’s baggage–the experiences that have created her. “Don’t forget your bags” is a thing one might say to oneself or one’s allies, in the vein of “Don’t forget who you are.” June’s baggage, scars, dreams, and memories are precious treasure; losing them would be like losing a map to one’s heart. These bags–and, by extension, June’s songs–stand as talismans, reminders of a journey and the wisdom gleamed along the way.

June hails from Perth, Western Australia, but was born in Wales, the household of her childhood soundtracked by her parents’ favorite Britpop bands. When her family relocated to Australia, June took singing lessons and picked up the guitar at age eight. By ten, she listed “releasing an album” at the top of a personal bucket list.

At the beginning of 2022, June took the leap into recording original music, releasing a series of singles that gained recognition from the likes of triple j, who praised her songwriting that “brims with emotion, storytelling, and intelligence.” She recruited a band and performed at a handful of regional festivals in addition to a national tour supporting Stella Donnelly.

June has gone from a dreamer to a fine plyer of songcraft; at the core of her lyrics is a cathartic release of emotion that she comes by with an honesty so raw as to be rarely heard. Don’t Forget Your Bags reads like pages of a journal faithfully kept over time as if flowers pressed within an unruly volume. Her own process of growing up has stood as a reservoir of inspiration, guiding her to craft lyrics from a place of vulnerability. She writes of young love and angst with the seriousness of immediacy; she speaks of learning about the kind of person you are as you age, watching your friends change and drift away or stand closer than ever.

Pre-release single “Melbourne” is a mesmerizing incantation, revealing the passage of time through the changes in the lives around you, while “Cooking Oil” brews with the alchemy of ire. “Freckled Friend Forever” is an ode to missed chances and unspoken yearnings–a gentle lullaby to love’s might-have-beens. These songs draw inspiration from luminaries like Fiona Apple, Big Thief, and Lucy Dacus, but resist comparison; they’re distinctly direct, not a recollection of what youth was like but a primary source that says this is what youth is like.

Now, June can check off that bucket list item with the release of her debut EP, Don’t Forget Your Bags, out now via Father/Daughter Records.

Tracklisting:

1 Melbourne
2 The Wheel
3 Cooking Oil
4 Freckled Friend Forever
5 Dead
6 Slate is Clean