Hold on for a wild and difficult ride
Alabama Shakes’ second album a big departure from its debut hit
Alittle more than three years ago, as Alabama Shakes mythology goes, Brittany Howard was still delivering mail for a living.
Now, after hundreds of gigs, mountains of effusive press and a surprise 750,000 in sales for the Athens, Ala., quartet’s 2012 debut, Boys & Girls, Howard and her bandmates are about to release a followup, Sound & Color, that has a definite air of “too good for its own good” about it.
It’s a terrific album, make no mistake, and Howard is no imminent danger of returning to the U.S. Postal Service to make a living.
But it’s tough to predict whether the masses who thronged to Boys & Girls and its calling-card single “Hold On” will stick around to snap up Sound & Color in similar numbers once word gets around that this smouldering, smoked-out psychedelic-soul opus is . . . well . . . a little difficult. Either way, Howard doesn’t care. “I spent a lot of time in the basement, just thinking, like: ‘Where’s my head at? What’s interesting? What’s exciting to me?’ ” says the powerhouse 26-year-old vocalist and guitarist from a tour stop in Tempe, Ariz.
“And when I stopped trying to write songs like Boys & Girls, then it became easy. Then it was just arriving and being delivered from who-knows-where, and it became much easier and much more fun and much more present — like, here and now.
“I think you have to ask yourself why you do what you do. Why do I play music? Why do I perform?
“And it’s truly because I think it’s something I’m meant to do and I don’t want to abuse that by trying to formulate success.”
“Success wasn’t something we were ever looking for, so keeping it up doesn’t really matter to me. It’s really about not taking what we have for granted.”
Regardless of what happens, Sound & Color is a keeper, one that finds Alabama Shakes making a beeline for the outer reaches pioneered by R&B/funk/rock fusionists such as Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic, Stevie Wonder and Prince before them — with the odd Velvet Underground drone-out and southern-accented Tom Petty gnarl thrown in along the way to keep you guessing.
Boys & Girls Part 2, then, it is not. But it is an accurate reflection of how much Alabama Shakes, which was not long ago busting out classic-rock covers on the southern bar-band circuit, has grown in confidence and musicianship after the two years of non-stop roadwork it put in behind the debut.
To do anything else would have been dishonest.
“Our first record was something we made pretty quickly. It was songs we’d been performing live for a little while and we just wanted to have a record out like a real band. We didn’t expect people to pick it up and listen to it like they did,” says Howard. “It was pretty shocking. We love the record, of course, but then, we made it. But it was pretty surprising that people were responding to it like they were and so quickly.
“I think it was kind of good for that to happen. It made me a pretty driven person to get this record out — just because there’s so much more we have to say as a band. And I think even still, even as this record’s about to go out, there’s still more that I want to do and ways I want to expand it and surprise myself. That’s what it’s all about, I think.”
Alabama Shakes — also composed of guitarist Heath Fogg, bassist Zac Cockrell and drummer Steve Johnson — had to fend off producers thinking, “Yeah, I’m gonna get a huge hit off this band,” she says, before finding a kindred spirit in California singer, songwriter and studio hound Blake Mills. She credits him with encouraging the band to go as far out as it wanted to with Sound & Color.
“He really let us be ourselves, and when there were times we were doubting ourselves, he’d just say: ‘No, that’s great. You guys are doing great. It sounds great,’ ” she recalls. “Some- times you just need that when you’re all looking at each other, like, ‘This sh-- is kinda crazy.’”
Alabama Shakes won’t make it to Toronto until it headlines the Field Trip festival at Fort York on June 6, so that’ll give fans plenty of time to sink into the new record before they hear the songs live.
And Sound & Color will only get better with time, provided the “Hold On” crowd hangs around long enough to get it.
“Oh, I really want them to hear it,” says Howard. “People who have this idea that it’s gonna be Boys & Girls 2, I just want them to hear it and know that there’s so much more to us than being a ‘cornered’ R&B-throwback band.”