The 34-year-old Chicago native had not been back to the Quad-Cities until COVID hit in early 2020, and she moved back to her uncle’s Rock Island house, where she recorded her debut album, “Help Is Not on the Way.” JUNO performed Saturday, June 19 as part of the Juneteenth Festival, at the Lincoln Center, Davenport.
“When the pandemic hit, I was in Nashville at the time and my lease was up and the tornado had hit there. I was just like, you know what? I’m going to go back home and plant some seeds in this community. We got a year pretty much.”
“That’s why it was such a full circle moment. I left Rocky, never came back and then I just happened to be locked in during the pandemic in the same room I grew up in high school, and made my album in that room.”
Since she’s been back, JUNO made it a point to connect with people, and help inspire others, like at her high school. She reconnected with Essence Wilmington (who she used to babysit for when JUNO was a teen), who runs a dance studio and choreographed her first music video.
JUNO has a program called Building Black Leaders, stemming from her online guitar workshops, which she leads on Zoom, with 400 students. She offers scholarships for kids, including students at Rocky.
JUNO grew up on the south side of Chicago, in a family led by a struggling single mother, and she was moved to Rock Island to attend high school. Her uncle worked for John Deere, her aunt was principal at Hawthorne Irving Elementary School, and it was a chance for her to be in a more safe, stable place.
JUNO graduated from Illinois State with a degree in social work and didn’t pick up the guitar until her first job after college, as a drug rehab counselor in Bloomington, Illinois.
“Because I grew up with a single mom and we utilized a lot of social services. I always felt a responsibility to give back when I could. So the best thing I could think of was to make a career out of helping people, that probably needed the same type of help that we needed.”
Her first client, a 15-year-old heroin addict, was obsessed with guitar and he lost his guitar privileges for not following program rules. JUNO saw this as an opportunity to convince the center to give him his guitar back and asked him to teach her to play.
"I literally felt passion go through my body for the first time. I never experienced feelings, something recreational and like, wow, this is something that I’m touching the strings, and I can feel something in my body and I just, I never felt that before and I wanted, to be honest, I set small goals and I started to lift my self-esteem. Man, I want to try that again tomorrow, I want to try that again tomorrow.”
“That just gave me a little bit of confidence, and I got really excited and addicted to the passion of how it felt to do something that just moved so many people. I mean, music is so powerful.”
Teaching herself to play, JUNO later went to the Berklee School of Music in
Boston for two years before being asked by Fifth Harmony in 2016 to go on their
world tour, and she’s returned to Berklee to speak with students, including
virtually over the past year.
“I feel like finding your own path means having the confidence to do what feels
right for you even if it’s not popular. That’s what finding your path is.”
“You have to be confident enough to say, even though this thing is popular right now, that’s not who I am. So I’m going to continue to develop who I am. Because one day, that’s exactly what people will want. Me — not me being somebody else.”
The Fifth Harmony tour took her all over the world, and a tour with Bruno Mars and Camila Cabello followed. JUNO wrote songs for her 2020 record while on tour with Fifth Harmony, originally intended for Camila Cabello’s solo album. Cabello convinced her to keep them for herself and that boosted JUNO’s self-confidence even more.
“That’s what I’m trying to do – if someone looks up to me, the only thing I think to do with that is re-direct them back to themselves. Because we all have this awesome, amazing light in us and I just think that the Quad-Cities has so many talented, brilliant people that I’m sure have so many cool visions and ideas.”
JUNO titled her album “Help Is Not on the Way,” because she says “if you wait for somebody else to come change your life, they are not coming.” While she’s played all over, she says she knew no one else could get the sounds in her head like she could.
“I had a message I wanted to say and I wasn’t going to ask anyone else’s permission or wait for someone else to help me say it.”
JUNO says it was special to play in the Q-C, in her first live solo show since the pandemic, and she’ll be here into July. One song she did during the Juneteenth celebration was “Rise Up Together,” which she wrote before the pandemic but didn’t make the album.
“That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to come back here and you can do well, but it doesn’t feel good until you can come back and bring people with you.
I just want people to see themselves in all their heroes and see that they too are human beings who have the ability to make something happen if they want to. They just got to find the right team and find the right way to do it.”
“We can inspire each other and in fact, we can collaborate and both of what we’re doing can be more meaningful because we came together.”
For more information, visit theartistjuno.com.
And for Jonathan Turner, I'm HT.
