Bathtub Escape
Brittany Howard shares her number-one stress reducer on long tours.
WHEN BRITTANY HOWARD first began touring the U.S. with Alabama Shakes circa 2010, she’d steal a few moments in the grimy tub of the band’s shared Motel 6 room. Later, as the band became a Grammy-winning success, she’d enjoy a finer soak. “It’s the place at the end of the day where I am all alone and grounded in comfort,” says the singer, 31. “I like to picture all the stress going down the drain.”
Howard, who released an excellent solo debut last year, makes sure to ask about the bathtub situation wherever she’s traveling now. “These hotels, a lot of them don’t understand how important it is,” she says. “They’ll say, ‘Yeah, we’ve got a bathtub’ — and then it’s a bathtub-shower combo, which to me is not a bathtub. That is for children.”
Last fall, Howard created @candlegazing, a secret Twitter account devoted entirely to rating the bathtubs she encounters on the road. Her handful of followers are treated to reviews of tubs that range from the pitiful (“Yawn,” reads one devastating review; “some calcium buildup under the faucet,” reads another) to the sublime (Manhattan’s Hotel on Rivington is her gold standard). She uses a one-to-five scale, guided by straightforward criteria like “Location” (“I don’t want to be staring at a toilet”) and less obvious qualities like “Loneliness” (“If it has two headrests, that’s just reminding me I’m alone”).
Howard has endless ideas on the subject of tub improvement, and she dreams of one day designing bathtubs herself. “Sometimes, they make them a little narrow,” she says. “I need to be able to flip around several times, like a dolphin coming out of the ocean.”
But ultimately, Howard doesn’t think she’s asking for much: a space to relax, talk on the phone, maybe toss in a bath bomb (“I do dabble with Lush”). “Some people meditate, some people go for runs,” she says. “I take a bath.”