When blues-rock titans Alabama Shakes unleashed incendiary protest single American Dream this April, its litany of furies surrounding civilian shootings, body autonomy, wealth disparity and more — all set against a backdrop where the President has “got The White House all pretty and pimped out” — seemed a particularly timely call to arms. However in reality, the trio’s indomitable vocalist Brittany Howard explains, nursing a coffee the day after their first London show in 10 years at Alexandra Palace, its lyrical howl of desperation dates back to the turn of the decade: a damning indictment of just how little has changed since the Shakes started making early moves towards what would become this month’s vital third album, I Must Be Dreaming.
“I mean, me personally, I would love not to write songs like that. I would love to write songs about peace and love. But that’s not really what’s staring me in the face,” she considers. “You can’t help but look at people you care about, especially people who are under the boot so to speak, and be affected by it. I can’t explain [the world] because it don’t make no sense to me, but you can’t help but look at people you love and see the worry in their face, and the fear that they feel, and not feel some type of way about it. It’s like you sign an agreement when you pay your taxes, but then they don’t fulfil what they said they were going to do.”
In the time since their last album, 2015’s Sound & Color, Howard moved around, “just trying it out”, but eventually returned to the band’s birthplace of Athens, Alabama. “I lived in Oregon for one little baby second, and New Mexico for a second, but there’s no place like home, you know?” she smiles. When she speaks about people around her struggling to make ends meet, it feels particularly pertinent as, were it not for the wild success of the Shakes, the band — completed by guitarist Heath Fogg and bassist Zac Cockrell — might have found themselves facing similar problems.
Howard grew up in a house in the middle of her family-owned junkyard. Global stardom of the kind that earns you a Billboard No 1 and three Grammys, as they achieved with Sound & Color, was not something that occurred in a place like Athens. “I thought maybe the most we would do is get to tour as a band and make some albums and I was totally OK with that,” Howard says. “I think it still feels, even today, very miraculous because we are from a small town. It’s not as small as it used to be now, but back then, I don’t know if you’d hear of such things happening.”
Yet, from the moment 2012 breakout single Hold On introduced the world to Howard’s colossal vocal — a voice so rawly emotive and undeniable, it immediately yielded comparisons to Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner and many of the all-time greats — Alabama Shakes were vaulted into music’s premier league. Of the unanimously positive reviews of that year’s debut album Boys & Girls, NME called her voice “so much the star, it probably has its own dressing room”, while the LA Times described the band’s composition at the time as “three men and one young explosion”. Determined to make the most of the unlikely uptick in fortune their talents had earned them, they toured relentlessly and took every offer going until their batteries started to run out.
“I was young, and I had the energy, and I wanted so badly to make the opportunity worthwhile”
“I didn’t realise how giant some of those steps were that we were taking. We were in the fast lane in a way, but I didn’t realise it at the time,” considers Fogg. “I was young, and I had the energy, and I wanted so badly to make the opportunity worthwhile,” Howard nods. “But I feel like the pace we went was pretty hard, pretty quickly. And we had all planned to do that ’cause you never know when the runway’s gonna run out. But I also think time gets away from you and goes by real quick too.”
Maybe it’s the relaxed nature of their Southern delivery, but for a trio with an album as sonically exploratory and thematically dynamic as I Must be Dreaming in their pockets, it’s surprising just how casually Alabama Shakes talk about how they nearly gave it all up. “I think where we left it, the conversation I remember was that it was going to be done for a while, if not forever,” says Fogg. “It was a crazy time when you look back on it. We just got in a van one day and never stopped.”
Howard considered getting a normal job. “Whatever I can get,” she shrugs when asked for details. “I don’t have a college degree, so I’m just out in the workforce like everybody else.” Instead, she wrote and released two solo albums — the five-times-Grammy-nominated Jaime and follow-up What Now. The band kept in touch. Slowly, they started talking about touring again and the urge to make new music followed.
With two Trump presidencies etched into the history books in the time since they last wrote an album, alongside an array of horrors and atrocities that have led Howard to often declare on stage how sick she is of the word “unprecedented”, the Shakes’ third album naturally became a mirror of both despair and hope. There’s American Dream and Tea Time — a track that Howard has said was born from looking at the actions of billionaires and seeing comparisons to the feudal system. But there is also the gauzy, psych-addled I Feel Hope Coming, with its defiant message of love and faith in people. One side begets the other.
“I don’t know everything. I just feel like somewhere along the way, it feels like our country got sold or something,” she sighs. “It’s true you can go to America and you can start from the bottom and you can get to the top. Yes, you can do that, but your children may not have access to birth control. Or if something bad were to happen to you, that’s going to be your whole paycheck,” she says. “I think we need to put humanity first, and not just run off causing wars so that these people get rich from selling their war equipment. It feels like they forgot about us a little bit. We are the people who pay for all this stuff.”
She continues: “But seeing people in the streets protesting; seeing people look at the world around them and consider that maybe this isn’t the way things have to be; seeing people come together and unify for the betterment of each other — and not just in our country but around the world, saying, ‘We don’t want to see this thing and it’s not in our name’ — that makes me feel hopeful. You could look at the world and you could see it as a chaotic place spinning towards destruction, or you could see lots of people really trying to build bridges to each other and really trying to make it work.”
There are lots of places where Howard has been finding pockets of hope recently — not just in the protests she’s been attending and finding deep, “electric” togetherness, but also in how the World Cup brought people from around the globe together in America. “I met some people from Croatia and they were so nice!” she says. “I’m like, oh my gosh I never met anybody from Croatia before!” Alabama Shakes’ own return, and the spirit of community their gigs foster, doubtless will do its bit, too. “Humans want to be together. You go to a show and you instantly have something in common and people get to connect,” she says. “Having spaces to go to feels human and doesn’t just feel digital in a phone. It’s something you can really feel in your skin, you know?”
And if all else fails, maybe Brittany Howard’s previous inclination to go back and get a regular job could provide its own solution. “I do like the educational side of YouTube,” she muses. “I learned how to rebuild an engine on there, and learned how to lay concrete. I feel like I could build a house! Maybe I’ll build houses for people with my YouTube university…” Life-changing vocal riffs and a dab hand at grouting? Get yourself a superstar who can do both.
I Must Be Dreaming is out on August 28
Alabama Shakes playlist
October — Okonski
Howard: “There’s no lyrics. When I listen to it, I can imagine and dream.”
More Bounce to the Ounce — Zapp
Fogg: “My nephew wants a talk box for his keyboard and he got me into this.”
It’s a Groove — Wilson Pickett
Cockrell: “Beautiful guitar playing.”
