Alabama Shakes are about to release their second album, Sound & Color, a follow-up to Boys & Girls, their irresistible 2012 debut. Boys & Girls upturned the lives of Howard, guitarist Heath Fogg, bassist Zac Cockrell and drummer Steve Johnson. Before that, they were another dressed-down rock-and-blues band in their hometown of Athens, Alabama, not above doing covers in a local venue called Yesterdays, or afternooning at old people’s homes. Then one of their songs, the brash, catchy Hold On, became an online and radio hit. Their debut LP sold a surprise half a million, all of this hauling them out of Alabama and sending them… well, everywhere else.
They gigged in front of millions on Saturday Night Live and toured the US, Europe and Australia. They were a star turn of the UK festival season in 2012 then played at the Grammys in 2013, where they were nominated in three categories. Apart from a short break last year, for Howard to write songs for the new record at her kitchen table, and for Fogg and Johnson to tend to newborn kids, Alabama Shakes have been “road-dogging” ever since their breakthrough. It’s Howard’s phrase. “Road, road, road,” she explains, “then a few days back home to sleep, then road, road, road.”
When you’ve become popular by being very definitely from a place (and Alabama Shakes are very definitely from Athens, Alabama; the music they make channels the bluesy sound that has defined the region’s output since the days of Aretha), the challenge is to carry that sense of place through all the other places that popularity takes you. How to summon some authentic “heart of Dixie” in front of lagered-up campers in Perthshire, as the band will do when they travel to T in the Park this summer? Or on stage at the White House, where they played for the Obamas two years ago? It’s something they think about a lot.
They still dress down to perform, usually wandering on stage in hoodies and home-wear, something that can be read as affectation. But it’s an honest effort, I think, to retain a sense of themselves as the underdog band they once were. Gigging at Islington Assembly Hall in February (the night before I meet them, the venue just a few turns up the canal), this quartet slunk out and picked up their instruments as if they were still jobbers who hardly expected to be listened to, not headliners for whom everyone in the room had paid £40 to see. What else? Howard has a charm-like tattoo on her arm – a thin line tracing the shape of Alabama’s borders. “So that I could die in London or Paris or wherever,” she says, “and when they’re wrapping up and cleaning my body they’re gonna know.”
We’re outside the pub again, to escape the jazzy 60s music, and so Howard can smoke. “I never thought I’d be a singer when I started this habit,” she says, frowning at her cigarette. “I was 15. Ugh.”
She is tall, bespectacled, wrapped in an oversize leather coat she calls her “Trading Places jacket. In that movie everybody was wearing shit like this. Look at the sleeves!” Back in 2012, she had lots of wild curls, but the hair, now, has been buzzed into a compact wedge. It started falling out in the studio, she says, after a botched effort at straightening it. Howard is mixed race, inheriting from her African-American father a frizz that will fight to the death against being chemically messed with.
She is stocky. Without my prompting she alludes to being on a diet more than once. I bring this up because Howard does, though I have definite reservations. Nobody ever asks Jay-Z to account for his height, Chris Martin his skinniness. Howard’s shape, like her thick-rimmed specs, like her being “the only rock’n’roll brown chick”, as she once put it, all help to make her an unusual and intriguing frontwoman. But most of her appeal, trumping even that tremendous, cig-roughened voice, lies in her habit of going absolutely bananas on stage.
Lit by devil-red spots, Howard will fold herself over her guitar, riffing, howling, as if in critical pain. “I call it ‘the spirit world’,” she says, when I ask where she goes in these moments. “Latching on to a feeling, riding it, trying not to come out of it. You stop thinking, you’re just performing – that’s the spirit world.” She isn’t much of a one for microphone patter. “Sometimes between songs I have nothing to say. It’s not because I’m not appreciative of the applause, the love. I’m just still on it, and I’m trying to keep on it.”
As a woman fronting a band, she says, “you’re expected to be a darling up there. Like, ‘Look at that sweet little thing! Singing her songs about lurve.’” Howard shoots me a look: nope. “I’m a human being,” she says. From: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/29/alabama-shakes-interview-sound-color-festivals
