Brittany Howard traces the Alabama Shakes reunion back to a brewery fundraiser

Brittany Howard has explained how Alabama Shakes became a working band again after a decade apart, and the answer starts with a brewery. Speaking to Kyle Meredith on the Consequence Podcast Network, she described a chain of events that began with a favour and ended with the band's third album, I Must Be Dreaming.

An old friend in Tuscaloosa whose brewery had been badly hit by COVID asked Howard to play a fundraiser. She agreed, then realised the same man had mattered just as much to Zac Cockrell and Heath Fogg during the band's lean early years, so she invited them and brought them onstage without warning for Hang Loose and Hold On.

That night reset something. "It kind of took me back to a place where every music was exciting, the world was exciting," Howard said, describing a nostalgia less for the songs than for the version of themselves who had been friends, bandmates and family at the same time.

Demos started moving between them again. A three-song EP was the original plan; it grew to seven and then to a full album. Howard was firm that the point was not to retrace old ground: "We weren't going in to recreate Boys & Girls or Sound & Color," she said, adding that the question they put to each other was simply what they were into now.

The answer was a psychedelic soul record where her interior life keeps meeting an increasingly unnerving outside world, most directly on I Feel Hope Coming. Getting there was difficult. "I very much wanted to almost disappear because it's easier that way," she admitted, saying she had not felt like writing or singing at all.

What she pushed through to is not soft reassurance. "There's no leader and there's no savior. We are leaders. We are the saviors," she said, arguing that anger and outrage can be a sign that people are finally ready to move, and that the moment calls for more responsibility toward each other. That is the register the reunion of this rock and rnb-soul band landed in.