Brittany Howard explores first losses and first loves on new record

Arts

Oct 16

Featured

Brittany Howard has stopped sharing the spotlight - although she never really did. Even when she fronted the blues rock outfit Alabama Shakes, the large Black queer woman who growled, billowed, crooned her band’s way into four Grammy Awards and international recognition was always the focal point. The Gwen of their No Doubt, but while Stefani made her best work with her bandmates, Howard’s solo debut suggests the best is yet to come.

As a Southern expat who had just moved to New York City, I fell in love with the Shakes. Helpless against their muddy guitar sound and a lead singer who’d barks lines like “Pass me whatever there’s drank left in / Well, I don’t care if it’s seven in the morning / For all I care it could be the second coming.” My dormmates from all corners of the country couldn’t deny their (read: her) power, either. It’s the kind of music that fills the room until it subsumes it, and before you sense it - you’re bouncing. Kids from Ohio and the Bronx would ask, “Who is this?”

The group’s first two albums explored blue-collar themes, particularly the toll of working and the subsequent emotional clarity (or absolutism, depending on who you ask) overexertion provides. “There ain’t no money left / Why can’t I catch my breath? / I’m gonna work myself to death,” Howard sings in “Don’t Wanna Fight”, adding too damn tired to the laundry list of reasons why a couple should quit bickering. It’s the kind of deeply adult record pop should but will never be filled with.

Since putting the Shakes on hold, Howard has tried other sounds: a rock album under the moniker of Thunderbitch and a folk singing trio. Strong efforts, but both lacked the symbiosis of her former band.

Jaime, the first solo album under her name, picks up where the Shakes left off, but is an intimate and notably softer invitation into Brittany Howard’s life. She has always sung about love, but this record clues you into more of the who and how. “Short And Sweet” features her quietest vocal delivery to date, a delicate track about how time can kill a fling.

On “Georgia” she embraces her gay identity with a newfound boldness, at least from what an audience has been privy to. Singing from the perspective of her younger self, an uncharacteristically subdued Howard mumbles, “Afraid to tell you how I really feel or show you what I really mean when I say hello,” to an older girl. Capturing that gay adolescent stomach flip you had when looking at that person in a way you’ve been taught you shouldn’t. “Georgia - is it unnatural?” Your first crush, the confusion and fear; a synth organ surges and she howls her name. It’s a new kind of religion.

Howard has always tackled the concept of faith in her work. After all, the Alabama Shakes’ breakout single was called “Hold On.” In more ways than one, Howard is a survivor. She grew up in a trailer park, the gay daughter of a white woman and a Black man. When she was eight, she beat a rare form of eye cancer that claimed the life of her sister (the album’s namesake) and part of her vision. When she sung that iconic 2012 chorus of “Bless my heart, bless my soul / I didn’t think I’d make it to 22-years-old” she meant it. This record lends more context to these assertions with tracks like “Goat Head” - a startling reflection on the complexities of her mixed race identity, named for the severed animal head her dad found in the back of his car one morning, his tires slashed. “When I first got made / Guess I made these folks mad,” she states matter-of-factly.

At a Shakes concert in Brooklyn in 2015, I met a fan from Alabama in the audience. “I think she knows how lucky she is to have gotten out of Alabama, to be a Black girl who’s gotten out,” she told me before the set began.

Today, Brittany Howard is 31 and still singing about faith, whether literally in funk spiritual “He Loves Me” or more conceptually in talk-track “13th Century Metal” where she vows to “oppose those whose will is to divide us.” Similarly charged but subtly delivered sentiments can be found throughout Jaime. They’re not presented as deliberately political, but coming from a Black queer woman, they inherently are. Howard is aware of this, showing her hand in the music video for the lead single “Stay High.”

It’s a breezy, seemingly innocuous tune about getting stoned and unwinding. The video chronicles a laborer’s drive home (played by Terry Crews) through a small town, where he’s greeted with cheery images of the Southern working class reality: checking out at the grocery store, families sitting on porches, friends meeting at a drive-in. At one point, the camera cuts to a police office enjoying ice cream with some locals. A brief but telling inclusion. It ends with the laborer arriving at home, where he’s greeted by his white wife and multi-racial daughter. Familiar? You’re listening to it on Jaime.

“I think it’s an important time right now to make people feel good,” she said recently on an episode of SongExploder, “it’s crazy out there, man.”

Howard doesn’t seem someone keen to dwell on her troubles. Or at least she’s very Southern about them. Work hard, push through, the sun will rise. But she does find time to take pause. “‘Cause what’s this world without you in it?” she asks on “Presence.” Although she’s gone on record saying the question is addressed to her current partner, on some level, it’s probably also for her lost sister, the one who first taught her how to make music.

Brittany Howard doesn’t have an answer for the present, but the album serves as one for Jaime.

Featured