The first time Alabama Shakes came to Los Angeles, Brittany Howard bought a longboard. This was in the early 2010s, as the fiery soul-rock band was beginning its ascent from a small town in the Deep South to high-profile gigs at the Grammy Awards and the White House; even back then, the group was generating so much energy onstage that Howard found it useful to have an outlet after shows to “kind of come down,” as the singer and guitarist puts it now.
Does she still skate?
“No,” she says with a laugh. “Little bit older — don’t want to fall and break stuff.”
The bones are feeling brittle?
“The bones are feeling strong,” she replies. “I just don’t want to test them.”
A decade and a half after that initial visit, Howard and her fellow Shakes — guitarist Heath Fogg and bassist Zac Cockrell — are back in L.A. on a recent afternoon, gathered in a West Hollywood hotel suite to discuss their new album, “I Must Be Dreaming.” Due out Aug. 28, it’s the band’s first LP since the three reconvened in 2024 after a seven-year break, during which Howard launched an acclaimed solo career that encompassed collaborations with Bon Iver and the Oscar-winning film composer Ludwig Göransson. Nothing too dramatic broke up the Shakes in 2018, nor has their return been accompanied by much hoopla (beyond their decision not to invite back drummer Steve Johnson, which we’ll get to in a minute).
“I don’t know about ‘comeback,’” Howard says when asked what term best describes the band’s reunion. “What y’all think?” she asks Fogg and Cockrell, both of whom respond with quiet shrugs.
Yet “I Must Be Dreaming” reveals a group still thrumming with creative purpose. The music, which takes up love and nature and a society in peril, expands the Shakes’ rootsy sound in funky and unexpected directions; instead of a throwback from a band whose last album came out at the tail end of the Obama era, the record feels like a product of our darker, more anxious age. It also frames the Shakes, all in their late 30s or early 40s, as a kind of generational bridge between influential Gen X groups like Radiohead and Wilco and adventurous Gen Z up-and-comers such as Geese and Wednesday.
“I thought we wanted the same things,” Howard sings over Cockrell’s creeping bass line in the murky “American Dream,” which goes on to enumerate some of those would-be ideals — peace, happiness, opportunity, freedom — before Howard checks herself: “I must be dreaming.” In “Another Life,” Fogg’s guitar trembles and clangs as Howard muses on the cosmic ramifications of a broken relationship; “Tea Time” finds the singer known for her belting vocals exploring her more delicate falsetto against a spooky, lopsided beat that evokes the music of the late J Dilla.
Susan Tedeschi, another powerful belter whose Tedeschi Trucks Band will co-headline a handful of dates this month with Alabama Shakes, says Howard has “definitely created her own style,” which she reckons has resonated beyond rock to open pathways for young soul singers like Olivia Dean.
“She’s not afraid to talk about what it’s like growing up biracial or what it’s like growing up as a gay woman,” Tedeschi adds. “It takes courage to do these things, especially nowadays.”
Howard, who grew up fishing and writing poetry in rural Athens, Ala., formed Alabama Shakes with Cockrell, a former high-school classmate, in 2009; at the time, the singer had to schedule band practices around her job as a mail carrier. The group’s 2012 debut, “Boys & Girls,” drew comparisons to Tina Turner and Janis Joplin and earned the Shakes a Grammy nomination for best new artist; Jack White took them on tour as an opening act while President Obama invited the band to take part in an all-star tribute to Memphis soul music.
“Sound & Color,” which came out in 2015, was somewhat artier but met with even greater success, topping Billboard’s album chart and winning three Grammys. At that year’s Lollapalooza festival in Chicago, no less an admirer than Paul McCartney brought Howard onstage to help him sing the Beatles’ “Get Back.” After a few more years of touring, though, the band split primarily so Howard could pursue her solo work.
Yet by late 2024 — not long after she’d dropped an LP, “What Now,” inspired in part by a divorce — the singer had started thinking about the Shakes again. So when a friend in Tuscaloosa asked her to play a benefit concert that December, she used the opportunity to reach out to Fogg and Cockrell.
“I was just like, ‘Do y’all want to go down there and play some songs?’” Howard remembers. “And they were like, ‘Hell yeah.’”
Says the soft-spoken Cockrell of the gig: “It was pretty rocking.”
During the band’s hiatus, the members had scattered slightly, with Fogg in north Alabama, Cockrell in Nashville and Howard just outside the country-music capital. Neither Tennessee resident cops to having much interest in Nashville’s glitzy Lower Broadway district, where tourists stumble from one bar owned by a name-brand country star to another.
Whose joint would they hit if forced?
“The emptiest one,” Howard answers. “Whoever’s having the poorest business, I’d go to that one.”
Pleased by the response to the show in Tuscaloosa, the Shakes booked a lengthy tour with stops at the Hollywood Bowl and New York’s Forest Hills Stadium. Justin Eshak, the Island Records co-chief who signed the Shakes after putting out “What Now,” says going into business with the reactivated band was a no-brainer.
“A lot of the stuff that came out around the same time the Shakes broke feels very of that time to me,” Eshak says. “Whereas Brittany and this band sort of exist in their own universe.”
Yet the reunion proceeded without Johnson, the band’s founding drummer, who’d pleaded guilty in 2020 to violating a domestic violence protection order and who was arrested in 2021 on charges of child abuse. The charges were later dismissed — Johnson’s lawyer said they stemmed from a “spanking incident” — but the Shakes asked for the drummer’s resignation around the time of his arrest, according to a series of videos Johnson posted last year on Facebook (as reported by AL.com).
Howard says that while the band was inactive, “We decided we weren’t gonna move forward with Steve. So with us coming back together, that wasn’t really part of the equation.”
Asked whether Johnson’s legal issues made them think differently about the band’s history, the three band members go silent for a moment.
“With Steve, there’s a lot of things that have been public about his life,” Fogg says. “Some are true, some aren’t true — he’s been proven innocent in court for some things. That’s not publicized. I think we’re bonded with Steve in a way because of things we’ve done in the past, and I think we all care about Steve and want him to be happy and healthy.”
With a new drummer in Noah Bond, Alabama Shakes recorded “I Must Be Dreaming” in Nashville with producer Shawn Everett, who collaborated with Howard on her solo records and who’s worked in the studio with Adele and Miley Cyrus, among many others.
Howard says that figuring out what she wanted to talk about in her new songs took some time.
“It was kind of like I had to access what was percolating because part of me was looking at the world and feeling a little shut down, as anyone would be,” she says. “Having to open back up and access my feelings was quite the experience.”
Her lyrics for “American Dream” were inspired by a track Cockrell sent her that felt “sludgy and hard to wade through,” as she puts it, which brought to mind her concerns about the environment at a moment when President Trump is cutting regulations regarding climate and energy. (The song name-checks both the Environmental Protection Agency and a “pretty and pimped out” White House.)
“There’s supposed to be this social agreement between us and our government, and I feel like they’ve broken the social agreement,” Howard says. “Then we’re supposed to keep pretending we’re in la-la land and everything’s gonna be great. And I just don’t think that’s realistic.”
Those misgivings come through in the frayed edges of the band’s handmade sound on “I Must Be Dreaming” — a welcome approach when AI is quickly making its way into music along with every other creative field.
Fogg admits he’s “very negative” on the new technology, which he sees being used by musicians who try to reverse-engineer songs created by platforms like Suno and Udio. “My whole thing is: When you use generative AI to come up with ideas, people forget what ideas were theirs and what ideas were the computer’s,” he says. “It’s a very slippery slope.”
“I got a new iPhone the other day,” Howard pipes up, “and it has this feature on it where it will read my text and then text somebody back for you. The f— is that? Do people use this?” She shakes her head.
“Obviously, I don’t want a bajillion data centers poisoning the earth,” she says. “But it’s also like: What even is art if it’s something that could just be generated?”
With the new LP on the way, the band will lean further into those human qualities on the road, including a performance in late September at Eddie Vedder’s annual Ohana festival in Dana Point. Yet beyond the dates they have scheduled or in the works, they’re not quite sure what the future holds for a back-in-action Alabama Shakes.
“We haven’t really discussed it,” Howard says. “I think we’ll just have that conversation when the time arises.”
Are they hopeful at least that they’ll achieve what they want to before the robots take over?
“Man, I’m not gonna be a good robot servant at all,” Howard says. “I don’t know how to do nothing but this. Robots don’t eat fish, so I can’t fish for them, you know what I’m saying? I’m screwed.”
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