COVER STORY | Brittany Howard’s Dreamworld

Brittany Howard’s new album has some trash on it. Not that there are any bad songs, but Howard does use a literal trash can as an instrument. She’s at a stage of her career, one which includes the likes of Grammy nominations, performing alongside Elton John and late-night television performances, where she has endless tools at her disposal. Yes, there might be a shiny $3,000 drum set in the corner of Shawn Everett’s studio, but you know what might work better? How about a metal garbage can?

“It’s a simple philosophy: If it sounds good, then it is good,” Howard explains from her Nashville home on a Zoom call. Using household objects, like that trash can, can “create a visceral response. I wanted things to be very real.” And very real they are. What Now is the product of an artist at the apex of her powers, a masterwork that encapsulates her artistic strengths and musical prowess. It’s the culmination and payoff that she has received after spending over a decade in the grueling music industry. There’s no doubt she’s at the top of the proverbial mountain, so determining what comes next can be its own challenge. As Howard puts it herself: What now? For starters, a record about examining the past and trying to pave a path forward using that reflective insight.

With just two simple words, Howard conveys a sprawling web of potential meanings. Throughout the 11 songs that make up What Now, she wants people to find themselves in those layers and multitudes, but she’s intentionally vague about what those songs mean to her. “I don’t really want to say anything and explain every song, because I want it to mean something special to them, whatever meaning they assigned to it,” she says. Still, as a whole, What Now explores the patterns that Howard has fallen into in her past relationships, and she used her new solo album as a way of working out those feelings. “I consider the songs like journal entries,” she continues. She was “hanging on to relationships for probably too long because I didn’t know how to use my own voice. There was a part of me that was not willing to let go, and that was something I had to learn.”

That’s a mentality she adopted with her music, as well. Rather than looking at her solo debut LP, 2019’s Jaime and deliberately mining that record for sounds she wanted to appear on What Now, she thought of both records as separate entities—two disparate works of art that exist on their own terms and nothing else. Both Jaime and What Now are portraits of Brittany Howard at that present moment; her music is a method of capturing her headspace at a specific point in time, and you can look at the trajectory and see the patterns and continuity for yourself. For Howard, though, she’d rather not make music using her preceding work as a template. She wants to start fresh every single time.

“There are some certain style choices that I stick to, but that has more to do with my own style of expressing myself,” she says. “I didn’t really look back at Jamie and be like, ‘Okay, what elements do I want to bring from that into this?’ It was, to me, like a whole separate thing.” But there are still some elements that Howard wanted to carry over into her sophomore album: namely, the excellent band of people she recruited for Jaime. There’s virtuosic jazz drummer Nate Smith, her Alabama Shakes bandmate and bassist Zac Cockrell and in-demand engineer Shawn Everett, to name a few. Their contributions shine bright on What Now just as they did on its predecessor. Take Cockrell’s groovy, syncopated bassline of the title track, or Smith’s in-the-pocket rhythms driving “Another Day.” Moments like these conjure the same spirit that the best parts of Jaime elicited, like the freneticism of “13th Century Metal” and the halftime, percussive feel of “Goat Head.” Needless to say, Howard’s rhythm section remains unmatched.

Of course, Everett’s role on What Now is as crucial as it was on Jaime and Alabama Shakes’ Sound & Color, lending a clarity to Brittany Howard’s songs with his ear for detail. The drums are punchy and pristine, and Cockrell’s nimble basslines add a textural chug; it’s all in service of Howard’s vision. In her words, reuniting with Everett was like “a family reunion.” Even though they’ve been working together for nearly a decade, his talents never cease to amaze her. “Hats off to Shawn,” she says. “He did it again! He’s a magic man.” Everett leaves his idiosyncratic stamp on everything he touches, from Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour to the War on Drugs’ A Deeper Understanding. Each instrument has its own space, its own spotlight that never detracts from the song itself. That’s all to say that he’s a great engineer and co-producer for an artist like Howard; he complements Howard’s work with sonic flourishes that add but never overwhelm, emphasize but never isolate.

When it came time to record What Now, Howard knew Everett’s studio would be the perfect place to lay down the tracks. Although some of the songs were already finished, others were in more nascent stages, leaving room for the duo to assemble them however they deemed fit. She would have the blueprint finalized, but it was up to both of them to figure out where to take it from there. “I would have 10% of a song done, and I would know that it could be great,” Howard notes. “Our job was like detectives to figure out the rest of the puzzle, like, ‘How’s this going to wrap up?’” Other times, the material she brought in would significantly change course. “I Don’t” is one of those tunes. “When I brought it in, it was a different creature; it was slower, and it was boring,” she continues. “The structure was there, but we needed to speed it up, and then I sampled the demo itself. We put it on this MIDI keyboard, and then I started doing this chipmunk soul thing with it. The whole song picked up and formed from there.”

Listening back to “I Don’t,” it’s easy to hear what she’s talking about. The backing vocals evoke 1960s girl groups, except Howard’s fellow singers are simply past versions of herself, pitched up to emulate the sweetness of classic outfits like the Supremes or the Ronettes. Opener “Earth Sign” likewise took an impromptu turn. “The second half of the song is this piano piece I wrote on the spot,” she recalls. “Maybe because we didn’t have a second half of the song, that worked out.” Then there’s a track like “Samson,” a late-album standout whose origins were completely extemporaneous. While Howard was in the studio, she encountered a trumpet player named Rod McGaha, who laid down some horn parts for a couple of hours on a whim. “It transformed everything and made me want to work so much harder,” she says. On What Now, Howard allowed herself to embrace a more spontaneous creative outlook. She let the music dictate where she would go rather than adhering to a fixed structure or timeline. “I’ve never really done that before,” Howard adds of her chance meeting with McGaha and how it altered her working style. “It was so cool. I relinquished control over everything. I really like the way it turned out.”

This unfettered mindset gave her the space she needed to actually complete the album, too. For instance, there were moments when she didn’t think she was going to finish the title track until she adopted this mentality. Over the course of the songwriting process, Howard learned to truly trust herself and put faith in her artistic instincts. The rest naturally followed suit. “Every time I would go [into the studio], I wouldn’t really know what to expect because things would change,” she says. “It was a learning experience for me: trusting myself to be open enough to finish the songs. Musicians and producers know what it’s like to start music and never finish it.” But when she did finish something? “I was met with amazement. I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is incredible.’ I actually finished the songs. Now, it’s an album.”

Coincidentally, “Samson” chronicles Howard’s feelings of uncertainty and indecision. Although the lyrics at face value describe a relationship falling apart at the seams, it conveys a similar state of doubt that she had to overcome during the songwriting process for What Now. “I’m split in two / I don’t know what to do,” she sings, her voice wavering at the end of each line, reflecting her multilayered ambivalence. “I have a lot of internal chaos going on, and this album was a way to make sense of what I was feeling and experiencing,” she says. Sometimes, those feelings assume several forms, speaking to Howard’s experiences in more ways than one.

“I Don’t” documents Howard’s battles with depression: “All work and no play makes me a very sad one,” she coos at the end of the chorus, her soothing voice joining the ensemble of her demoed selves. Closing track “Every Color in Blue” takes another look at all-encompassing gloom, describing how it’s often invisible but nevertheless devastating. “You don’t see my injury / You don’t see the energy it takes me,” she sings, tracing her upper register over Nate Smith’s gentle yet driving beat. Music is a balm for Howard. It’s a way for her to channel various sentiments at once and make sense of disarray. When she was writing her debut, Jaime, it was an outlet for her to process everything from her childhood and her intersectional identity as a queer Black woman, to her steadfast faith despite distancing herself from organized religion.

The COVID-19 pandemic may have forced Howard to cancel her extensive headlining tour surrounding Jaime, but it also, however strangely, renewed an inner spark. “I was sitting around the house for a while until, several months later, I was trying to come to terms with what’s happening,” she explains. “Finally, there was the stillness of, like, ‘I don’t know what to do with myself. Oh yeah! I’m a musician! Let me go make music.’” From that moment forward, the songs practically wrote themselves, spilling out in an inspired fervor. As Howard puts it, “music became a hobby again instead of my job and something that I needed to focus on and take seriously.” She adds: “It became fun again because it wasn’t the most important thing. The most important thing was not getting sick and taking care of each other.”

Brittany Howard is going wherever the creativity takes her. Right now, that’s her solo work. With the release of WHAT NOW, she has just as many solo albums as there are Alabama Shakes albums. It’s been nearly a decade since the last Shakes record, too. They’ve since announced an indefinite hiatus, and drummer Steve Johnson was arrested for child abuse in late 2021. Guitarist Heath Fogg put out music with his own project Sun on Shade in 2020. Bassist Zac Cockrell and Howard are occupied with her current work, so it only feels natural to wonder what the status of the Shakes currently is. “I’m doing this project until it feels like the creativity is not here but over there,” she says. “I feel like that’s a conversation I’ll have with the guys if we want to make music again.”

Great art is seldom forced, and Howard recognizes that. If she doesn’t feel inspired by what she’s doing, then she’ll simply pursue something else. “In my own experience, when you force something that’s uninspiring, you ask yourself some questions, like, ‘What are you doing it for?’ It’s not something that has to be forced to happen,” she adds. “That’s a boundary of mine. Right now, that creativity is all bubbling here. It’s all happening right here in front of me, where I’m at. I honestly have and always will follow where the ideas are.” Even then, she still gets to make music with Cockrell, one of her closest friends and collaborators since they were both teenagers. “That’s someone whose opinion I really care for,” she says. “Creatively, me and him bounce ideas off of each other so freely. He’s the best bass player.”

As far as Howard’s artistic inspirations go, they’re as expansive as her sonic palette. Influential Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s surrealist, late-career gem Dreams gets the first mention. More than anything else, Dreams was the main impetus behind What Now. “It’s autobiographical, but it’s very colorful and very fantastical,” she says. The film’s discrete vignettes follow one man from childhood to adulthood, its fanciful colors playing off the environment to construct a hazy, visual marvel. Incidentally, there’s a segment where the protagonist steps into a Vincent Van Gogh painting and meets Van Gogh, played by Martin Scorsese, himself. Similarly, What Now revels in whimsy and playfulness, all the while detailing Howard’s own life experiences. Frankly, it’s not difficult to see the parallels, however tenuous they may initially seem.

While Dreams embodies the amorphous, freeform nature of the record it inspired, Howard grounds her musings with insistent, locked-in grooves. When she was making What Now, she exclusively listened to Stevie Wonder. Her listening habits filter through the heavy syncopation and freeform imaginativeness across the record. More specifically, she namechecks Wonder’s masterful 1976 double album, Songs in the Key of Life, as a major catalyst. That record “was his freedom to have creativity,” she says. “Some of it is inspired by showtunes, and you can tell that some of it is inspired by classical music. I think it was his freedom to pick and choose from this giant box of music, and I liked that vibe. So I got on that vibe of anything goes.”

Howard stayed true to that ethos. “Prove It to You” is a bonafide house cut with a pulsing, four-on-the-floor beat. The first time I heard it, it caught me completely off guard in the best way possible. I never thought I’d hear Howard singing on a track like this, but it fits seamlessly within Howard’s musical milieu. “All I wanna do is prove it to you,” she sings over sleek, clubby synths fit for a crowded dance floor. It illustrates what Howard was discussing earlier in our conversation about letting ideas come to her. “Whatever comes goes, like that song came to me,” she says. “I loved the way it felt, and I loved the expression of the lyrics. Yes, it is a house song. But it harkens back to when house songs were a little simpler and more straightforward.” On “Prove It to You,” she taps into the universal sentiment of proudly showing your love, pining for another person and the endless ways we display that sense of longing. She wasn’t hesitant in the slightest whether she wanted to include it on the album: “I was like, ‘Yeah, this can go on there! This is strange enough. It’s going to make it.’”

Howard is also looking forward to translating these new songs to a live environment. Because the tour for Jaime was cut short, she’s ready more than ever to connect with both her fans and her band. “It’s quite a production,” she says. “There are a lot of people on stage; everyone’s really making space for each other.” As mentioned, the musicians in her band are each incredible and virtuosic in their own right. It’s no wonder she’s so eager to perform What Now for a crowd. “They need to express themselves and who they are,” she says of her band. “At the same time, we’re creating this environment for people to walk into, so I wanted to keep a lot of the visual elements from What Now in the live show.” Although she doesn’t clarify what visual elements she plans on incorporating, you can only assume that it will be as gorgeous and dreamlike as the record itself. Above all, she just wants to create a memorable experience for everyone. “One thing that’s really important to me, and probably the whole reason I do this in the first place, is the connection: connecting to people and being seen by people,” she adds.

The live show is, and invariably has been, an essential vessel for that. Howard understands that on both an individual and collective level. “Everybody’s having their own experience, but at the same time, everybody loves the music,” she says. “They come to enjoy the music and to support the artists, and there’s something that everyone can relate to going on in the audience.” As a whole, live shows can reinforce why community is so vital, that art in all its forms is rarely an isolated phenomenon. Even if the art-making process itself is spent in solitude, sharing that art with others, a crucial part of it, will always be communal. “I got some of the coolest fans in the world, people of all different backgrounds,” Howard says. “They’re kind, giving people, and I love how they treat each other. I love how good they’ve been to me, too.”

In recent years, Howard has been fortunate enough to meet some of her own musical heroes, including the iconic songwriter Joni Mitchell. Speaking with Mitchell was a reminder for Howard to stick to her passions, musical or not. Like she said earlier, it’s important to let inspiration take hold of you and not force something that doesn’t feel organic. She has applied that attitude to her life in general, too. “With Joni, it was apparent that music is a part of her life,” Howard says. “But there are so many other things that she’s really passionate about and really good at, and that’s mainly what we talked about. We talked about animals and we talked about painting, and that was so cool—to see this other side of her and see how chill and laid back she is.”

Now that she has had the opportunity to meet living legends like Mitchell, Elton John and Paul McCartney, I start thinking about what a follow-up to Jaime (Reimagined) would look like. Released in 2021 as a sister record to Jaime, its “reimagined” counterpart featured interpretations of each proper track—including high-profile names like Childish Gambino, Bon Iver, Fred again.., Syd and Georgia Anne Muldrow. Will What Now get its own version, and whom would she recruit for such an outing? Howard says the plans are to be determined; right now, all her focus is on the album proper. But, in an ideal world, she’d definitely want to snag cultural behemoth Taylor Swift (“I think it’d be very interesting if Taylor Swift took a stab at it”) and Icelandic art-pop auteur Björk (“Björk would go crazy with it”). What Now (Taylor’s Version), anyone?

Although Howard would be interested in doing a reimagined version at some point in the future, she’s going to appreciate the present moment. For the time being, she’s giving her attention to the project she poured her all into. More than anything, she’s simply proud that What Now exists, that she’s bringing it into the world for everyone to listen to. “It’s never lost on me how incredible it is, as musicians, as writers, to receive ideas and to have the tools to make those ideas real and then to share them with the world,” she says. “It’s such an incredible, divine thing that we get to do this. It’s a real privilege that I still get to hear music and have wonderful musicians, engineers, producers, managers and all these different people who celebrate that work and help me put out that work. I still have this childlike wonder about it.” Despite her intent to dedicate herself to this release, though, Howard never stops thinking about what’s next. “I’m trying to stay present with this one, but it’s hard not to keep creating all the time,” she says. “We’re never promised time.” At the end of the day, the eternal question is, oddly enough, what now?

Watch Alabama Shakes perform “Hang Loose” at the Paste Magazine office in 2010 below.

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic in Kansas City. He writes the Best New Indie column at UPROXX. His work has also appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications.