BLOCKERS - New Audiobook from Bestseller Michael Lewis PRE-ORDER NOW
he singer tells Broken Record’s Justin Richmond how a friend’s struggling Tuscaloosa brewery turned into I Must Be Dreaming, and why soul bands, not metal bands, are the real party animals
Alabama Shakes went quiet for over a decade after 2015’s Sound & Color, with Brittany Howard building a parallel career on two solo albums that pushed her sound into stranger, more personal territory. Now she, guitarist Heath Fogg and bassist Zac Cockrell are back as a trio with I Must Be Dreaming, and Howard sat down with Broken Record’s Justin Richmond to explain how the reunion happened almost by accident.
A longtime friend named Bo Hicks, co-founder of Druid City Brewing Company in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who used to let the band crash on his couch in their early years, reached out because his business had struggled since COVID. “He was like, hey, since COVID, my bar has been in trouble, mind coming and helping me out,” Howard recalled. She called Fogg and Cockrell. Everybody loved Bo, so everybody said yes. Rehearsals for what was supposed to be a one-off show turned into a small anniversary tour, then a plan to cut a single, then seven songs, then a full album. “It kind of naturally unfolded like that,” she said.
Howard was careful to note the band members had changed in the intervening years. “I think our tastes have grown. I think we’re wiser as people,” she said, adding that she’d drifted toward instrumental composition on her own records and had to “reintroduce” herself to what made the band work as a unit. She was also blunt about the group’s wilder younger days on the road: “Soul bands are the ones that actually party hard,” she said, more than metal bands, “you gotta look out for them.” These days, she added, “we’re just a bunch of sweeties now.”
Howard pushed back on any easy nostalgia framing for the band’s sound. Alabama Shakes broke out at a moment when soul revivalists like Charles Bradley and Sharon Jones were reintroducing vintage arrangements, but Howard said the band deliberately avoided a “full retro” approach, layering in MC5, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and hardcore acts like Converge and American Nightmare. Fronting a band with that kind of aggression “felt good, especially as a woman,” she said. “It felt cathartic, and it felt like the right thing to do. It felt honest.” She credited Cockrell as the band’s secret architect this time around, comparing his musical memory to “an encyclopedia” that traces obscure session players across records, filtered through his love of Madlib and MF Doom. Several songs, including the album’s opening track, started from a Cockrell bassline that Howard built vocals and lyrics around after the fact.
Howard traced her own path back to watching a band play in her Athens, Alabama, high school gym at age 11—the guitarist, unbeknownst to her at the time, was Fogg, who’d later join Alabama Shakes. She credited an uncle who played metal guitar and taught her Guns N’ Roses and Jimi Hendrix riffs, and a great-uncle who ran a bluegrass jam in his woodworking shop, where a young Howard first grabbed a microphone and sang until, in her words, her throat nearly bled. She didn’t know she could really sing, she said, until her mother heard a demo Howard burned onto a CD and told her so.
Engineer Shawn Everett, who’s worked with Howard since Sound & Color, remains what she called her metaphorical “third hand”—a collaborator who says yes to weird experiments, like handing drummer Nate Smith a pair of chopsticks mid-session to change his kit’s tone. Cockrell himself played drums on the new song “Garden” when no drummer was available that day.
Howard also spoke candidly about the current political climate, telling Richmond she believes “now more than ever” is a moment for people to lean on community and share whatever gift they have, musical or otherwise, rather than wait for a single unifying leader to emerge.
Read more on the band’s reunion and the making of the record in Rolling Stone. I Must Be Dreaming is out now on Island Records.