HOWARD FINDS NEW GROOVE
Songs written amid pandemic that grapple with frustration, pain, love become powerful LP with different sound
When Brittany Howard was 17, she lived alone, in a haunted house in Athens, Alabama, that had belonged to her greatgrandmother.
At first, she was thrilled. Alabama Shakes, the band she started with her high school classmate Zac Cockrell, practiced there. Then doors started to open on their own. Cabinets slammed shut. One day, Howard was outside the back door when she heard the lock slide closed on the inside. Thinking someone had broken in, she crept into the kitchen and grabbed a weapon she kept behind her fridge.
“I had this machete, and I’m clearing rooms in the house like I’m Bruce Willis in ‘Pulp Fiction,’ ” she said on an afternoon in January. “There’s nobody in the house.”
After seven years, Howard abandoned the old, run-down duplex, but she has long maintained a connection to the ghosts of her past, and her music has often felt haunted. The Shakes were imbued with the essence of artists who preceded them by a few generations — Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Curtis Mayfield — and shaped by an American South that sometimes struggled to look forward instead of back. In 2019, after two albums, and just as the band appeared poised for superstardom, Howard walked away, releasing “Jaime,” a solo debut named after her late sister.
She recently returned with “What Now,” an album filled with wailing soul, jittery funk and buzzing grooves born of frustration, pain, love and intense questioning. Its roots can be traced to the pandemic, and another house Howard believed might be haunted: a big 100-year-old yellow rental filled with antique furniture in East Nashville, Tennessee.
“I came by this album pretty honest,” Howard, 35, said. She has spent nearly all her life in the South but in 2019 was living in New Mexico with her wife, singer-songwriter Jesse Lafser. As Howard was getting ready to release “Jaime,” their marriage was coming apart.
“I got divorced and drove back to Nashville,” Howard said. “I was like, ‘Man, I thought I was through with
this place.’ ” In March 2020, she was preparing for a European tour when the pandemic scotched those plans. It was just as well. After nearly a decade of writing, recording and touring, Howard was burned out.
“I was in the house, excited not to have to be a musician and just be a human washing groceries,” she said. “I was hiking, fishing, outside every day. I was listening to Stevie Wonder’s ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ to keep my mood up. I finished all of ‘Tiger King.’ Then I ran out of stuff to do. I got to a point where I was like, ‘What am I for?’ ”
She set up a bare-bones studio in a small spare bedroom. “I’d just go in there and make whatever I was feeling that day,” Howard said. She didn’t think the songs would ever see the light of day.
It wasn’t until she revisited them a couple of years later that she realized what she had. “This album, for me, was just a series of journal entries,” she said. “Because it was the pandemic, my heart was going through so many things. There was all this sorrow about seeing the world on fire, seeing people the same color as you getting beaten in the streets. On the other hand, I was falling in love.”
The joy of this new relationship was shaded not only by the darkness of the world around her, but also by the specter of past romantic failures. “There was a lot of fear,” Howard said. “What if this happens again? What if they don’t like me like that? Why can’t I enjoy this? All that had to go somewhere.”
The songs aren’t really about Lafser or any other former partners. They aren’t even about Howard’s new relationship at the time, which ended before the album was finished. The songs are about Howard, herself. “I’m the common denominator,” she said.
“What Now” feels like a breakup album, albeit one tinged less with bitterness for her exes and more with a harsh lens turned on herself. “Out there, there’s a love waiting for me,” Howard sings on the opener, “Earth Sign,” her voice floating over spare, ethereal piano chords. “I can feel, I can’t see/ But will I know when I feel it?”
Howard produced the album alongside Shawn Everett, who engineered “Jaime” and the second Shakes album, “Sound & Color.” He recalled that “Earth Sign” was a spare 30-second demo when Howard brought it into the studio. “One day, she was like, ‘Just give me the drums,’ ” Everett said. “Then without any chords even being there, she put this insanely complex harmony over the whole thing.”
From song to song, the album approximates the emotional whiplash of falling in and out of love. “The best time that I ever had/ That’s when the worst times started,” Howard sings on the humid, stuttering “Red Flags,” a track about careening into new relationships. “I wanted to talk about how I just let my heart rule everything,” she said. “When I feel love, I’m going in that direction. It’s like, ‘Honey, that’s not a parade! That’s danger!’ ”
For “Samson,” a hypnotic meditation on a dying union, she came into the studio with 16 bars of a drumbeat, some keyboard chords and a few lyrics. Working with Everett, she began to color in the rest, cutting, chopping and mixing in elements including a winding muted trumpet melody by Nashville-based jazz artist Rod McGaha. As the deadline loomed, the lyrics remained unfinished. “I just made them up in real time,” she said. “The vocals on it are live. The way I sung it, it’s like you’ve been wrung out.”
The effect is devastating. Singer-songwriter Becca Mancari, one of Howard’s closest friends, recalled when Howard first played her a rough mix. “I started tearing up,” she said. “I have chills thinking about it now. I remember being like, ‘This is my friend tapping into the ancestors.’ ”
Mancari introduced Howard to her current partner, Anna-Maria Babcock, when Howard was selling merchandise at one of Mancari’s shows. “When they saw each other, I felt this energetic wash,” Mancari recalled.
Amid all the tumult and heartache, “What Now” offers moments to dance through the tears. “It feels like this liberated, queer Black music,” Mancari said. “You could hear these songs in a queer club, which I’d never thought about a Brittany song.”
“What Now” doesn’t sound too much like what Howard has done before. As Cockrell, who played bass on both of Howard’s solo albums, put it: “The songs are all very different, but I can hear elements of Brittany in all of it.”
Considering her previous successes — five Grammys, a Billboard
No. 1 album — Howard’s refusal to repeat herself is refreshingly risky. Although she has never closed the door on another Alabama Shakes album, she is committed to her own restlessness.
“There are so many interesting things about music,” she said. “Why just do one of them?”