Is there a more powerful marketing tool than nostalgia? It’s an essential element of many a reunion tour, where audiences clamor to see acts from pop music’s past romp through the hits of their heydays.
There’s something a bit more complicated, and rewarding, going on with the reunion of the Alabama Shakes. For one thing, the band — which released its last album, Sound & Color, a decade ago — confronted the perception that it was a revival act earlier in its career. Initially, the Shakes were pegged as a retro Southern soul outfit, thanks to their preference for hand-played instruments and sinewy grooves, the ecstatic power front woman Brittany Howard could muster at will and the proximity of their North Alabama hometown to the storied recording scene of Muscle Shoals. But the group found that reputation limiting. They insisted that their influences spanned era and style, then proved it by pushing into thrillingly experimental territory. Once the Shakes went on hiatus, Howard developed into a solo artist with Afrofuturistic vision both unfussy and unbounded.
Another difference from many cash-in nostalgia-fest reunions: There’s new Alabama Shakes music. “Another Life,” the group’s first new song in 10 years, marks the reunion of musicians who have freed themselves from the pressure to exclusively orient toward the past or future. Howard and her comrades, bassist Zac Cockrell and guitarist Heath Fogg, are once again playing with ’60s rock and soul reference points — much like those listeners detected in their 2012 breakthrough debut album, Boys & Girls — only, where those old recordings had the unruliness of jam sessions, now they’re locked onto grander sonic ambitions.
The layers are more evident in Howard’s vocal performances too. In the early days, she grabbed people with her ingenious pacing of eruptive moments, and they tended to interpret what she was singing as literal truth. On Sound & Color and the two solo albums she’s released since, she became the auteur of her vocal sound, exploring whole new intervals and registers, and the evolution of Howard’s singing has illuminated the imaginative underpinnings of her lyrics. In “Another Life,” she pleads — with a seasoned soul singer’s conviction — for belief in reconciliation, while simultaneously pointing our attention towards alternate timelines and realities.
The Shakes are back out on the road, playing that song and other brand-new material — yes, there’s an album in the works — alongside their existing catalog. At Nashville’s Ascend Amphitheater, I saw their nine-piece touring ensemble framed by thickets of eerily lit vines, a far cry from the unadorned stages I remember them playing in the early 2010s.
Back in the day, Howard was reluctant to recount the stories behind their songs, but I witnessed her measuring, and marveling at, the distance the Shakes have covered. At one point in the show, she explained that the exhilaration of being able to buy her first home, thanks to the band’s success led her to write “This Feeling.” “For a long time, I was just living in a room in my dad’s house,” she recalled. “Finally I had this independence, and it was the most magnificent thing.”
Weeks later, just before she got summoned to another soundcheck, I told Howard that I’d taken note of those small, shared moments of reflection. “I want to invite them in,” she replied. “That’s kind of a new thing.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jewly Hight: I wasn’t sure what an Alabama Shakes recording would sound like in 2025. What do you think this track shows us about where your musical comfort zone is and what your appetite to experiment together is like now?
Brittany Howard: I wouldn’t say [it’s] super far away from the world of Boys & Girls, [but] it’s kind of an area we left unexplored, which is ’60s British soul rock. It reminds me of the Guess Who, or even early Tom Jones.
It’s something that I was really excited by: orchestrated ’60s guitar rock. We really didn’t have [a song] like that. I’m excited to put something out that I think fans of Boys & Girls can celebrate again. But as for the rest of the album, good luck. [laughs]
What do you mean by that?
I feel like there may be a few songs that group similarly together, like, they sound like they belong in the same world. But for the most part, we just did whatever we wanted to. There’s some stuff that reminds me of garage Sly Stone. And there’s some things that I don’t know exactly what genre it would be. It’s just experimentation.
You begin “Another Life” with this airy, elegant vocal attack that made me think of Curtis Mayfield’s falsetto. And from there, the wistfulness of your performance turns to pleading. What sort of niche are you finding with the Shakes now, after all of the things that you’ve gotten to try with your voice?
I’ve explored a lot of my dynamics vocally, but also emotionally. I’m older now and I think there’s a little more wisdom going on. Not everything powerful is loud. Not everything quiet is vulnerable.
What felt right to you about leading with a song that acknowledges the disintegration of a relationship, but ultimately makes a case for future possibility?
That’s kind of my philosophy on life: As human beings, I think we’ve kind of forgotten who we are. We’re not just, like, biological fleshy bodies walking around and making money. Science has kind of caught up to the spiritual idea of there being multiple timelines. Your soul is just a part of this experience. There’s so much more going on than meets the eye. Therefore, there’s so much more possibility to talk about these things as being natural things in existence.
Just because this didn’t happen in this timeline doesn’t mean it won’t arrive on another one, or [that] I’m not already experiencing this in another lifetime. It’s okay to let go. It’s okay not to be angry. It’s okay that not everything is meant to be you know. That’s kind of what that whole thing is about.
Of course, I would love for people to put their own meaning to it. The [Shakes] song “I Don’t Wanna Fight” — a lot of people take it to mean in a relationship, but what I actually meant was people as world citizens having to fight this, that and the other just to be people.
I saw the Nashville date on the Shakes’ reunion tour, and the set list encompassed every era of the band, the early Boys & Girls days, the Sound & Color experimentation and unreleased new material. After not playing your old stuff for seven years, what did it take for you all to get to know it intimately again? And what did you discover in the process?
Well, there’s something kind of funny: I was never a “usual” guitar player, so I didn’t play anything normal. So it was kind of frustrating for me to relearn my old parts. Because I was like, “What am I doing? Why did I play it this way?”
And then, while we’re playing these songs live, all of a sudden it’s like muscle memory will kick in. And I’ll just start playing it correctly out of nowhere. It’s almost like I remember from seven years ago where the fingers go, finally.
During the show I saw, there were moments when you reminisced about your initial triumphs, like that feeling of being able to buy your first house thanks to the success of the band. Now, I know you’ve never been big on nostalgia, but is there something about returning to the Shakes and going back out on the road together that puts you in a reflective mindset?
It’s like a forced nostalgia, because I’ve had to marinate so much on each song, ’cause I had to relearn them. So it’s kind of like going back to the place of writing the song, recording the song, playing the song out live — especially the Sound & Color stuff — and appreciating it so much deeper, in a way.
I think of a song like “Guess Who,” and I’m like, “Oh man, these chords are so cool. Zac came up with this cool chord structure right here. I love this.” That kind of thing.
You, Zac and Heath have built new realities since going on hiatus from The Shakes. For you, that’s meant standing on your own in the spotlight. Zac has seemed happy in a sideman role, and Heath has seemed equally content rooting himself in North Alabama where his family is. What is it like sharing the spotlight again?
I’d say it’s [required] some adjustments, because for some of us, it’s been a long time since we’ve been on the road in a big touring party and living out of a suitcase and not sleeping enough. It has been a new experience, in a way. I think we’ve all been really fantastic at helping each other and being cooperative with each other. Like, “What do you need? How do we make this more comfortable?” We’re so much more responsible.
A band reunion can be high stakes when the primary motivation is burnishing the legacy or making maximum profit. But the way you’re representing the Shakes’ reunion on social media strikes a different tone. You teased the Shakes’ new music with a delightfully absurd meme of someone impersonating a sea turtle laying eggs.
Alabama Shakes is from a small town, and we really went to high school together. And the whole thing started just from wanting to write original music, and seeing how far we could get with it.
The goalposts always move: “Now we want to see if we can get a tour. Now we want to see if we can just tour, and make this our job.” I feel like this is just another goalpost of, “Let’s see what kind of music we make now.” And it should be fun. We’re all happy to be back together, especially after such a long time. We still get along, we still have a lot of fun and we’re still joking around.
In your earlier touring days, I don’t recall you focusing on the visual side of production. But now, you have the stage covered in greenery and you emerge to swampy sound effects. What are you up to, playing with that imagery?
The stage design is really just kudzu, and it is definitely our unofficial plant. And it’s that certain time of the year when the kudzu is really thick and the crickets are singing at night. It’s kind of this little nostalgic place, especially from our hometown. And I feel like it made sense to kind of take the opportunity to do something creative and do something true that all kind of reminds us of home.
[In the past], we weren’t huge into production. I think a part of it was just letting music speak for itself. We had this strong belief that we don’t need all the lights and glamor to impress crowds, but now I feel like the attitude’s kind of like, “Actually, this is an art form and it’s really cool.” I guess that’s some of that maturity that snuck in.
I saw you rocking what looked a white, feathered caftan against the band’s naturalistic backdrop. What is it like bringing your experimentation with futuristic, regal or otherworldly costume design into a band that used to take joking pride in wearing regular, old clothes on stage?
I like the pageantry. One thing I’m really inspired by is community theater, and how in community theater there’s not a ton of money. So you have to do practical effects and practical things to get the vibe across to the audience.
There’s very simple ways to make people feel things, feel nostalgia or feel emotion or present what kind of show this is. And I feel like wearing those things is honoring these songs and also honoring the audience by putting on something unusual. I feel comfortable that way. I don’t like to feel under-dressed.
The band was a space of youthful experimentation for you all, where you found a sound together, and that blew up into something beyond your initial expectations. Can you put your finger on what it was that that pulled you back to that, after all of this other exploration that you’ve been doing solo?
I think part of it was just curiosity, given how much time [has passed]. Like, “Do you guys want to see what it sounds like?” And I think the curiosity was there for all of us, and all of us kind of put our rings together, you know, Captain Planet-style.
I think when we got to the studio, there was some feelings of, “How do we do this again?” But we all did have songs to contribute, and we all worked that material, kind of chiseled away at it to become something we all were surprised by. I think once we hit that point, I was like, “Okay, this is fun. This is exciting. I’m excited to see what we do next.”
By the time you all made Sound & Color, you were often fleshing out highly complex song demos on your own, and you’ve continued that with your solo albums. But I gather that’s not how things are in this era of Shakes music-making. Some of the new material is growing out of riffs, licks and song fragments Zac and Heath are bringing to the table. How is the collaborative dynamic working? What excites you about being on the receiving end of ideas now?
I was very ready to collaborate. It’s something I missed. I think it was a big part of the reason I wanted to call the guys up and get back together again. I finally reached that point of, “I’m done barfing my expression out. I would like to collaborate again.”
I feel like the guys had really good ideas. Some were like 30 second ideas that needed to be finished. Some stuff was full songs. It was almost like working backwards, where we have really great pieces of music and now I need to listen to this music and figure out what it’s saying.
What difference do you feel like working in reverse has made to the new songs?
There were times in the studio where I was like, “I don’t know if I’m going to finish this in time.” There were times where I had, like, a week and I had seven songs to finish and guitar parts to put down and lyrics to put down and I’m [putting in] 14-hour studio days. And then when that idea busts through, you’re like, “I got it!” Just the best, most gratifying feeling. And then you hear it all put together and you’re like, “Yes, I can still do this.”
Have you encountered anything truly unexpected on this journey of reuniting, returning to the road and shaping new music together?
I’ve been very surprised how many people are coming to the shows. The people are hyped. They’re just singing along. They’re dancing. I tear up every time I play “This Feeling,” because I’m feeling it. I’m so grateful that this has been how this all shook out, no pun intended.
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