Alabama Shakes Built a Kingdom in the Chaos
After nearly a decade apart, Brittany Howard, Heath Fogg, and Zac Cockrell found their way back to each other and into the studio for I Must Be Dreaming.
Brittany Howard said she had to talk with the guys first. That was the stock answer she gave to every journalist who would inevitably ask her about the status of Alabama Shakes, the blues-rock band she fronted that went on hiatus with relatively little fanfare in 2018. They’d released two albums, 2012’s lo-fi garage rocker Boys & Girls and 2015’s luxe, Grammy Award-winning Sound & Color, before their quiet, temporary disbandment. In the time since, Howard went on to release two solo albums, 2019’s Jaime and 2024’s What Now, the latter of which I spoke with her about just prior to release. That’s when I asked her about the state of the Shakes, and she gave me her standard reply: “I feel like that’s a conversation I’ll have with the guys if we want to make music again.”
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Several months later, Howard would talk with the guys—guitarist Heath Fogg and bassist Zac Cockrell—about a surprise reunion show. She was booked to perform an acoustic solo set at the Get Up 3 benefit concert in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on December 18. Funds would go directly to Druid City Brewing Company, an establishment that looms large in the local music scene, and she, alongside other Alabama legends such as Mike Cooley and Lee Bains III, would play at the Bama Theatre. Druid City co-founder Bo Hicks reached out to Howard directly and asked if she’d be interested in performing at the fundraiser, as his business had been struggling to rebound from the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Howard accepted the gig, but she had something else in mind.
The venue’s capacity is just under 1,000 people, so it would be a fairly intimate, low-stakes set. It seemed as opportune a time as any to get the band back together. “We all got on a Zoom call one day to catch up and brainstorm, and Britt proposed the idea of doing the secret show in Tuscaloosa,” Fogg tells me from his home in Alabama. “We were all on board, and then it just felt like a natural way to do something. Whether we did more after that or not, we weren’t really sure, but it was a great way to reunite.”
Howard had the idea to play one or two songs by herself, and then she’d pretend to forget her electric guitar and reemerge with her Shakes bandmates in tow. At first, she appeared onstage with just an acoustic guitar, and she sang, fittingly, “Short and Sweet,” a laid-back, breezy selection from Jaime. Fogg isn’t sure how many people took the bait, though. “There’s all this other gear on stage where she’s supposed to be just playing an acoustic set, but I don’t know how many people knew,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t know how big the surprise was for people, but it felt really great. It just felt fun for us. And I think everyone in the room felt it, too.”
Howard, however, believes they kept the surprise intact. “I remember trying to keep everything secret the whole time we were there, backstage hanging out,” she says, Zooming in from her hotel room before a Shakes show in Wyoming. “My dad didn’t even know! He didn’t put it together, like, ‘Why are all three of them hanging out back here?’ But the surprise on everybody’s faces, it was very worth it. I think that’s gonna stick in my head forever.”
After “Short and Sweet,” Howard feigned forgetfulness and reappeared with Fogg and Cockrell to perform as Alabama Shakes for the first time since 2017, and they ran through a 30-minute set that opened with alt-country fan-favorite “Hang Loose” and closed with their anthemic Silver Linings Playbook loosie “Always Alright.” “We had to get together and rehearse these old songs that we haven’t played in forever,” Howard says. “And through that, it was nice being around each other, playing music with each other again.” It took some time to relearn the material they’d grown so accustomed to playing night after night, but Howard says it was “like riding a bike.” The muscle memory served them well, and they were right back in it, as if they had never truly left.
Just a month or so later, Alabama Shakes were back in the recording studio, eager to make some new music—their first since 2015. “We were kind of just looking to get a couple songs, just to have maybe a single and a B side to put out for lining up some gigs in the future,” Cockrell says, hopping on a Zoom call from his Nashville home. One or two songs quickly turned into six. Maybe they’d do an EP? They eventually had seven new songs they’d recorded, at which point the band figured, “We might as well cook up a record.”
At first, the trio discussed doing some shows to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their landmark second album, Sound & Color. But Fogg says that strictly focusing on that record didn’t seem as enticing to him, and Cockrell felt similarly. “We were looking to do stuff that summer and didn’t want to just come back and make it feel strictly like a 10-year Sound & Color reunion,” the bassist says. “We just wanted to have something new to put out with. That was the talk.”
Shortly after the Tuscaloosa show, the three of them spent some time together to explore ideas for new songs. They went into the studio with their longtime collaborator Shawn Everett and fully winged it, at least for those initial sessions. Cockrell brought in a slate of demos, some of them just 30 seconds or a minute long, that the group then fleshed out together and turned into full-fledged songs. Brittany Howard and Fogg began pulling out some demos of their own, too, and the creative energy soon reached a fever pitch. It didn’t take long for the tunes to pile up: “Another Life,” “Tea Time,” a song Cockrell called “Slaw Dog” that’s since become “Easy.” “We ended up with a decent batch of songs by the time it was all said and done,” Cockrell says. “We worked on a lot of stuff over a year and chipped away when we could, and we started touring in the middle of it, too.”
Well before Alabama Shakes had even released new music, they embarked on a lengthy summer tour where they played large outdoor amphitheaters. Even without new tunes to their name, fans were just stoked to have them back in action. It wasn’t a front-to-back Sound & Color tour, but seeing as it was just one of two Shakes albums in total, they naturally performed most of its tracklist. “We wanted to go out and play a lot of Sound & Color for people, and we wanted to make the fans happy as well,” Howard says. “We wanted to celebrate these songs with them, and that was a big part of getting out there [on tour] early was to do that, and then when this new album comes out, we can lean into the new material. It’s about honoring that album, honoring our catalog, honoring our fans, and then also moving into the future this way. It feels like the right way to do it.”
Given that it’s been a while since the Shakes’ last outing, Howard was admittedly uncertain how many people would be buying tickets to see them. But the fans hadn’t gone anywhere, and she was pleasantly surprised. People came out in droves to watch them perform. I witnessed as much firsthand when I saw them last August at Kansas City’s roughly 8,000-person capacity Starlight Theater, which was packed on a balmy night under the cosmos. “We didn’t know fully what to expect coming back ten years later to tour,” Howard says. “We weren’t sure if people were gonna be in the seats or not. You just don’t know what to expect, but we’ve been having full crowds of people just giving us love, and it has been amazing out here on the road. I’m more grateful than I think I’ve ever been, just to come back and see that and have somebody there that wants to listen.”
Less than a week after I saw them, they released two new songs, “Another Life” and “American Dream,” both of which they’d played that evening. It wouldn’t be until July 10, 2026, nearly a year later, that the Shakes would announce their third album, I Must Be Dreaming—their first in over a decade. Fans had to have known it was coming, though. Just before that announcement, they’d begun introducing some more new material into the live show. They’d even started opening with the unreleased “Time.” “It’s kind of a weird curveball out of the gate: opening with one people don’t know,” Fogg says. “But it’s kind of fun. It sets the tone for the rest of the night in regards to mixing in stuff.”
“We do want the crowd’s reaction,” Howard says. “We want to know what people think. We want to connect to people. I think it’s cool to see who’s receptive out there in the audience, and, after that, we follow it with a hit. So it’s all good.” The Shakes are professionals. “Hang Loose” or “Don’t Wanna Fight,” both beloved staples of their catalog, are typically up next. “We know what we’re doing!”
As Howard tells it, these shows have been pure fun. Touring can be a strenuous endeavor for even the biggest rock bands. But the Shakes harbor no complaints. For both the thousands of fans in attendance and their own bond as high-school buddies, this reunion has been a nourishing, revitalizing force. “Hanging out with the guys on the bus after the show and watching movies and laughing, that fills my soul,” she adds. “That’s very fulfilling. Sometimes it feels like little kids having a slumber party on a bus.”
The Alabama Shakes always figured they’d get back together, but they never knew when that would be. In 2018, Zac Cockrell had his first baby on the way; Heath Fogg was about to have his second kid; Brittany Howard was burnt out. Some bands naturally drift apart and end up on an unintentional hiatus. But for the Shakes, it was a deliberate pause. They all needed a substantial break. For Howard, “It was a time for me to get back to myself, explore the world.” She knew they’d get back to making music as the Shakes when it made the most sense creatively, but she didn’t “know if there was really a need to announce the hiatus because we never knew when we were coming back together.”
“We had been hitting it so hard for a very long time,” Fogg says. So when they reached a point where there were no band-related obligations on the calendar, the guys turned toward their domestic duties. “That turned into more time than maybe we expected. As we parted, there was also no real plan to fire it back up.” Cockrell figured they’d reunite, but with each passing year, his certainty that the Shakes would reunite—be that on stage or in the studio—began to diminish. “After a certain point, I was like, ‘Maybe we won’t,’” he remembers thinking.
For Howard, the hiatus augured fresh, fertile ground. Part of the break was exhaustion from relentless touring, but “part of it was curiosity,” she says. “Time moves so quickly when you’re a touring musician. Everything’s on the books. Everything’s on schedule. Your year is planned. It was nice to just…” She pauses to search for the right phrase. “Take space to appreciate what we were able to accomplish, the sweetness of life. Spiritually and physically, it wasn’t going to be helpful to just keep going at that pace.”
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