What is “Her Name Was June” about?
"Her Name Was June" is a regret song about the one the narrator walked away from: he meets June at a gas station outside Tulsa, stays three years instead of moving on to Austin, and learns she keeps a notebook of poems she has shown no one else. She wants a garden and kids; he wants highways, and she watches silently from the porch as he leaves. Years later he still says her name "like a prayer sometimes." It is track eight on The Last Porch Light.
Her Name Was June lyrics
Her name was June and she wore her hair like summer
Loose and golden and always in her face
I met her at a gas station outside of Tulsa
She was buying cigarettes and I was buying time
She laughed at something I said about the weather
And that laugh rewired every plan I had
I was supposed to be in Austin by the morning
But I stayed three years in a town I can't go back to
Her name was June
And I loved her like a man who didn't know how yet
Her name was June
And she tried to teach me but I was a slow learner
Some people come into your life like a season
They change everything and then they move along
Her name was June
And she was the best thing I ever got wrong
She waitressed at a place called the Blue Moon Diner
Kept a notebook full of poems she never showed nobody
Except me, once, after a bottle of wine
And they were better than anything I'd ever heard
She wanted kids and a house with a garden
I wanted highways and the sound of my own leaving
And the night I packed my truck she stood on the porch
And didn't say a word, just watched me go
Her name was June
And I loved her like a man who didn't know how yet
Her name was June
And she tried to teach me but I was a slow learner
Some people come into your life like a season
They change everything and then they move along
Her name was June
And she was the best thing I ever got wrong
I drove eight hundred miles before I cried
Pulled over at a rest stop in the dark
And I sat there with the engine running
Knowing I should turn around
But I didn't
And that's the thing about regret
It don't hit you when you're making the mistake
It waits until you're old enough to know better
And then it breaks you wide awake
Her name was June
And I loved her like a man who finally knows it
Her name was June
And wherever she is I hope she's happy
Some people come into your life like a lesson
And you spend the rest of your years learning it
Her name was June
Her name was June
And I still say it like a prayer sometimes
Like a prayer sometimes