Alabama Shakes: from small-town bar band to titans of rock

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/29/alabama-shakes-interview-sound-color-festivals

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A few hours of model Englishness for the girl from Alabama. First, a walk along the concrete trough of a London canal, where Brittany Howard – the 26-year-old frontwoman of that brilliant rock band Alabama Shakes – reads aloud the prim names of the houseboats, dodges cyclists passing at speed, and observes the many tossed and floating bottles of Lucozade. She bends to chat to a moorhen. “Hey, little guy. Want a cigarette?” In a canalside pub she drinks her first-ever pint of English ale (“Nutty!”) and then, right away, her second. When she’d pictured this country as a little kid, Howard tells me, it had looked like a set from the Austin Powers films, a land crisscrossed by Carnaby Streets, with wacky cars. As if in answer to this, the pub’s jukebox whirs to life and blares out a jazzy 60s number. “With songs like this playing everywhere!” she says.

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.

Are none of the songs about love? I’m thinking about the title track from the first album, a plea for a friendship to evolve into something more, or a great song on the new album called Miss You, with its ear-worm lyric: “I’m gonna miss you/ And your Mickey Mouse tattoo.” Howard says they’re stories, thoughts, imaginings, overheard things,half-truths. She scrolls through some lyrics on her iPhone. This is how she writes, she says, tapping in random phrases whenever they come to her. One lyric was written, I can see, just after midnight a few days earlier. It reads: “I can’t have you for ever/ But I can try.”

This seems a preoccupation of Howard’s, not only wanting something but wanting it indefinitely. I ask if she’s in a relationship right now. “Uh, yes.” Is it new? “Relatively.” Does it look like it’ll last? “Mm-hm.”

And that does it for the boyfriend/girlfriend portion of the chat. Howard will flit engagingly between topics, from American politicians (“Lip-flappers”) to the Ferguson riots (“Long time comin’”), from her obsession with an old Nintendo game, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (“Completed it several times”), to her ill-timed meeting with Adele, backstage at the Grammys, when Howard was wearing only pants (“Spanx, actually”). But she isn’t interview putty. She won’t discuss what she doesn’t want to, and closes off avenues.

At one point, we drift on to the subject of ghosts. Howard checks for them, she insists, in any new home before she moves in. When I ask if she really believes in ghosts she says she does. When I ask why, she’s quiet for a time before saying: “Uh, nah. Let’s just… keep the conversation moving. Let’s not talk about ghosts.” Reading about her life, I know that when Howard was a young girl her sister, then 13, died from cancer. The funeral announcement, utterly miserable, still comes up online when you search Howard’s name.

“I can’t have you for ever/ But I can try.” This stuff isn’t always about love – or the lurve kind of love – I suppose.

*****

Walking along the canal again, Howard talks about her parents. “Really different from each other. My dad’s social, charismatic, knows how to do a lot with a little. My mom’s more responsible. She pretty much gave me my work ethic. You know, ‘Don’t quit your job until you have another, however much you hate it.’ I’m driven because of my mom.” They were not together when Howard was growing up. “My mom worked really hard to make sure I had things I needed. But sometimes it was tight.”

She was 13, out of a pre-teen obsession with the pop group Hanson, newly a fan of grownup stuff such as The Dark Side of the Moon, when she set about turning herself in to a musician. She taught herself the guitar and spent hours alone in her bedroom with a midi keyboard and a computer. Ten hours at a stretch, sometimes, just writing. It isn’t hard to imagine this being a method of coping with grief.

At school she met her future bassist, Zac Cockrell, in a psychology class. Cockrell tells me he remembers them first chatting over a Monopoly board, which they were meant to play as part of some busy-work experiment. The pair became friends and started jamming together, fleshing out Howard’s songs. It helped fill the time. “I hated high school,” Howard says. “I was bored.” Steve Johnson, a local in town, was recruited as a drummer after they’d graduated. Heath Fogg was last aboard, initially part of a rival band and switching teams because of the prospect of collaborating with Howard, who was showing signs of having some serious, industry-ready pipes.

By 2009, they were called the Shakes, booked for shows but still very much part-time. Cockrell worked at an animal clinic and Johnson at a nuclear power station. Howard was a chef at a steak restaurant. “Miserable,” she says, miming for me some glum spatula work, turning ribeyes. “Work, work, work – just to give your money to the utility company. Every day I went in thinking: ‘Fuck this place.’” She later became a postal worker, which was better. “But I was only having a good time when I was playing. I remember this little bar called the Brick…”

Online, I found some social media posts from this period of their lives. There will be sweat, the band write of a show at the Brick. There will be uncontrollable toe tappin… WE WILL BE COMING FOR THEM BRAINS. “Yeah I wrote that,” smiles Howard, tickled. She hasn’t thought about this for a while. They once put out a request on Facebook, asking people to suggest a new name because there was already a group called the Shakes in Philadelphia. The ideas that came back in were mixed. “The Shooks?… The Sweats?... Believe it or not, the Spasms hasn’t yet been taken… Milkwagon?… Thrashing Megalodon?… Boxcar Children?…” Someone at music blog the South Rail suggested the Alabama Shakes. Howard replied: “Yeaaah!”

Another blog, Aquarium Drunkard, praised one of their songs and provided a link, a small kindness that proved enormous. Through the blog, the track was heard by Patterson Hood, frontman of the highly regarded alt-country band Drive-By Truckers. He helped set the band up with their managers, Christine Stauder and Kevin Morris, and also arranged for the Shakes to open for the Drive-By Truckers when they toured. “The Truckers were my heroes!” says Fogg, who thought this support-slot booking a pinnacle moment. Ambition met. Retire happy. But after their tour finished, Fogg recalls, “everything kept going – at, like, a super-fast rate”.

Jack White became an admirer, and they duetted with Mavis Staples. Mercedes opened its chequebook and persuaded the band to soundtrack an advert. This summer, Alabama Shakes will play at a festival in Colorado, where Drive-By Truckers will open for them.

*****

Brittany Howard is funny. Catch-you-out, snort-into-your-glass-of-nutty-beer funny. She might suddenly assume a character – for instance, a misogynistic Alabaman, sweetly amazed that a woman can “even play the guitar good”. Her phrasing is always inventive and back in the band’s early days she originated an enormous roster of names for the improvised dance moves she’d perform on stage: the Reverse Raindance, the Matador, the One-Legged Foxtrot, the Pre-Apocalyptic Strut (completely different, she insists, from the Post-Apocalyptic Strut), the Full Body Seizure. When Howard tells a story it never quite progresses in a way you’d expect.

She starts talking about an upsetting time not long after the release of the band’s first album. Howard was visiting Nashville when she was robbed at gunpoint. “Out of the corner of my eye I see these two dudes coming towards us in a combat-running position… I just thought, ‘Please don’t let anyone get shot.’” Afterwards, shaken up, she drove back to Athens. “I had to pull over a few times I was so freaked out. When I got back I went straight to my best friend’s house. I said, ‘I just got robbed!’ He said, ‘Oh my God!’ I said, ‘Will you come with me to buy a vacuum cleaner?’”

Wait. What? “I just felt like I really needed a vacuum cleaner,” says Howard. “So we went to Walmart and I got an off-brand Dust Devil. And you know what? It made me feel better.”

Voices, made-up dance moves, stories with a sort of low-horizon good cheer: this is one way the band bring Alabama with them on tour. At my request, Howard demonstrates the One-Legged Foxtrot. She spreads her arms and does a deliberately awkward hop, upsetting the moorhens, her Trading Places jacket billowing in the wind. She’s brilliant.

When we walk on she talks about the best friend, the one who went vacuum cleaner shopping with her that day. He was the band’s first drummer, says Howard, booted out and replaced a long time ago for not showing up at enough rehearsals. They used to tell each other as kids: “‘We gotta get out of this town! We gotta get out of this town!’ It was all I would talk about,” says Howard. “Well, I did get out. Here I am.”

And the friend? She shakes her head. “It’s OK. He’s doing what he needs to be doing. I’m doing what I need to be doing. But every time I hang out with him I’m like, ‘Man, I just wish you were there’.” She means: there with her in front of the president, on primetime telly, at festivals in Ireland, Italy, Holland, Scotland. Hauling their act around, “taking a hobby and turning it into a profession”, as Fogg puts it, has tested Alabama Shakes’ sense of who they are and where they come from. But it has also shown them the world. Broadened them. Paid.

In something of a creative departure, Howard has written a song for the new album about global warfare. Don’t Wanna Fight was inspired by “people killing each other because of ridiculous assumptions. Are you a Shiite? Are you a Jew? I’ve started paying attention to things like that.” Back in Athens she’s been able to move out of the trailer she lived in for years, and into her own house. “I remember waking up for the first time there. And it was quiet. And safe. And mine. And I knew where my pots and pans were!” Last year, she treated her mum and grandma to a blow-out Hawaiian holiday, which included a helicopter flight over a volcano.

Growing up, I ask, were these things she had reasonable expectations of? “Oh, of course not. I didn’t know what I’d do. Ask my parents! But they were like, ‘Well, we’ll let Brittany figure it out…’ I figured it out.”

She figured it out. We both do a One-Legged Foxtrot, there on the towpath, to celebrate.

Alabama Shakes play the Great Escape festival, Brighton, on 15 May, and T in the Park, Strathallan Castle, Perthshire, on 12 July. Sound & Color is out 20 April on Rough Trade