After a Decade Away, Alabama Shakes Return With a New Song, ‘Another Life’
[NPR]
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.
Read interview here.