Plenty of long-dormant bands have proven that getting back together pays off — that nostalgia is big business. But that wasn’t at all what persuaded the Alabama Shakes to reconvene, hit the road, and ultimately make their first album in more than a decade, “I Must Be Dreaming.”
The Shakes achieved an international breakthrough in 2012 with “Hold On,” a loping soul number made indelible by how unexpected the tenacity of front woman Brittany Howard’s performance gave way to full-throated fire. And from then on, the prediction that she’d go solo followed her. As soon as she did finally step out on her own in 2019, people started hounding her about a band reunion.
“I’ve definitely had fans come up to me and be like, ‘Yo, are the Shakes getting back together?’ ” Howard recounts. “I’ve done lots of interviews like, ‘So, what’s happening with the Shakes?’ All valid questions.”
Her philosophy is prioritize whatever music-making avenue captures her imagination at a given moment. So she’d continually offer the same serene response: “When it’s time to do that, it will be time to that.”
The question that finally prompted a definitive “yes” about reactivating the Shakes came from a friend who runs a Tuscaloosa, Alabama, venue and showed the band hospitality early on. COVID shutdowns had decimated his business, so he was organizing a benefit concert
Howard was willing: “For sure, dude, I’ll do it.”
But she floated a different scenario during a band meeting on Zoom.
“She’s like, ‘I’m supposed to do it solo, but you guys want to do it as a surprise Shakes show?’ ” remembers founding guitarist Heath Fogg. “Without hesitation, I think we were all like, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ ”
“It felt low-pressure enough,” says bassist Zac Crowell, “like a good way to get out and do it.”
‘I kind of got something’
It may have been a homespun, low-profile gig, but thanks to social media posts from the lucky locals in attendance and a newspaper writeup, word spread and speculation about new music began.
Fogg had primarily been focused on family life in North Alabama, while Cockrell had just completed Howard’s “What Now” solo tour as a member of the backing band. “I wasn’t doing any of the press or the writing or any of that,” Cockrell clarifies. “I was just out playing. I know she had a lot on her plate, and then jumped right back into this.”
Not only was Howard feeling creatively spent, the political climate was weighing on her too. “The world feels quite overwhelming,” she says. “And some days, it was really hard to access that part of me that wants to create. There’s a big part that just wants to lay down in the sun.”
But this time, her bandmates’ musical ideas generated the necessary momentum.
“Zac, in a lot of ways, was the heart of the creative process of this,” Fogg explains, “because he had so much material that he had been working on.”
Cockrell had recorded a pile of instrumentals at home, after his kids were in bed. And he brought those to Shakes sessions on his desktop computer, which he “kind of just hauled around like a laptop.” He’d cue up various musical fragments to see which ones excited his fellow Shakes.
In the past, Howard filled the generative role for the group. She was the one who brought a desktop full of ornate musical visions to the making of the Shakes’ second album, “Sound & Color.”
“There’s a lot of songs on there that I had already finished, even the string sections on the song, all the vocal parts, all the harmonies,” she recalls. “And then I’d bring it to the guys and I would very shyly say, ‘I kind of got something, but I don’t know if you’re gonna like it.’”
It was a whole different way of writing to begin songs with their riffs and grooves. “Then I had to fill in the blanks,” says Howard, “but I also needed it to be something I believe in, and that I actually care about this thing that I’m singing about. I think it’s my worst nightmare to write a song just to write a song and not be attached to it in any emotional kind of way.”
She’d brought her individual perspective and social consciousness to the foreground more on her solo albums “Jaime” and “What Now,” and now she’s finding space for that with the Shakes. Take “American Dream.” The lumbering heft of the bassline and drum pattern helped her “access parts of me that felt uncertain, felt confused, which is like our climate and society here in America today. What’s gonna happen next? It could actually be anything.”
‘The power is in taking care of each other’
Still, much of the new album feels sumptuous and unhurried. Fogg hasn’t contemplated why that is, but he ventures a theory on the spot: “Things are coming out just softer and slower than ever before. You could attribute that to age. I’m always trying to slow things down a little bit in terms of my life, so maybe that is leaking into the music.”
Howard’s eruptive vocal performances helped put the Shakes on the map at the start. But now we hear her cultivate the tenderness of her upper register, like she’s pointing us to a more deliberately caring way of moving through the world. “I feel like that’s where the power is, in taking care each other,” she affirms.
There’s a sense in which her singing also cradles her own vulnerability. “Knowing [myself] to be easily breakable, I feel that I express that through singing in that falsetto,” she says. “I feel small, but I feel sure. It’s okay to feel these things, it’s ok to express this way. You can be that version of yourself.”
When the Shakes returned to the road last year, Howard brought a newfound openness to the stage, freely sharing inspiration behind old songs, something she’d once been reluctant to do, and marveling at how the response to their music enabled music-obsessed kids from smalltown Alabama build lives they’d barely dare hope for. And when crowds applaud a little louder and longer than necessary, she receives it warmly.
“One thing I’m learning is Shakes fans are very loyal,” she says. “They came back after all this time, and I can’t tell you what that feels like.”
Howard points to a gentler dynamic within the band too: “I think we came back together with a mutual respect of each other’s gifts. We look at each other now and make more room for each other to express those gifts.”
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