On a good morning, Brittany Howard wakes up and decides who she wants to be. She will come up with a character, select clothes to match and pick some corresponding music. Today, clutching her recently neutered puppy, Wilma, the character seems to be “teacher who lives on the French Riviera”: she’s in white trousers, a white top and a blue work shirt with a hat which says Women Love Me, Fish Fear Me. Another recent character was a tractor-driving fan of the country singer Luke Bryan. “I had my camo Crocs on and everything,” Howard says, before breaking into song, Bryan’s Huntin’, Fishin’ and Lovin’ Every Day.
It is disarming to hear this complex, captivating singer bend her voice around lyrics by a bro-country goofball. But Howard – the frontwoman of the rock band Alabama Shakes, a 16-time Grammy nominee and five-time winner (including solo and band nods), who has shared the stage with Paul McCartney and Elton John – is never just one thing. She is indeed damn good at fishing (and loving every day, or at least some days). She once had a Twitter account devoted to rating hotel baths, with ratings in tongue-in-cheek categories such as “loneliness” and “drownability”. She says that her donning of other characters is part of her “inner-child work”, a practice used by therapists to help process and break through lingering behaviours induced by trauma.
The only time Howard doesn’t adopt this practice is when she is making music. It’s the songs that are doing the work: the self-exploration, the dismantling and interrogation of patterns, the statements of love and joy when the world is suffering. She made her second solo album What Now here at Nashville studio the Sound Emporium, with additional parts laid down across town at RCA Studio A.
That title feels as if it has a double meaning. Who hasn’t routinely groaned: “What now?” in the past few years of pandemic upheaval and political unrest? At the same time, it sets up an album that twists and turns. Meditative crystal sound bowls coexist with scattershot rock’n’roll, acid funk, house music, Memphis soul and free jazz trumpet. What is coming next? What now?
Since her early days fronting the soulful quartet Alabama Shakes, Howard has been restlessly creative. The band’s sound is guitar- and groove-driven, fresh yet nostalgic. With the release of their 2012 debut, Boys & Girls, Howard went from bagging groceries and delivering mail to playing their song Don’t Wanna Fight at the Grammys, opening for Jack White and jamming with Prince.
“I wasn’t prepared for the life I had,” Howard says. “I’d never had money. I never had access. No one ever gave a fuck about me publicly.” Her touring schedule meant she lost touch with her home, “because I was never there. I felt so alone.” By the time a new album was due, the constant pressure and relentless touring had left her in a deep depression.
She ended up in her basement, writing what would become the band’s sublime, Grammy-winning second album, Sound & Color, which came out in 2015. It may be their last record, although Howard is quick to say the band isn’t necessarily over. Jaime came next, named after her older sister, who died at 13 from retinoblastoma, a cancer of the eye. It was rare among solo projects in that it didn’t feel like a diversion – it was an awakening, an unleashing. She wasn’t just a rock star; she was something more. Patterson Hood, the lead singer of the Drive-By Truckers, for whom the Shakes opened before they even had a record deal, calls her “one of the greatest artists of our time”.
“Between this project and the last, I’ve experienced a lot of life,” Howard says, stroking Wilma, whose head is covered in a post-op lampshade-style guard. “So much has happened and I’ve matured a lot. I’ve also mellowed out a lot, in a good way. I’m starting to have more clarity on what I want next. We’re not gonna get existential, but it’s hard not to.”
Indeed, it is hard to not get existential when talking to Howard. The 35-year-old was born in Athens, Alabama. Being mixed race and queer, not to mention a good deal taller than the other girls at school, fitting in was all but impossible. She is loth to describe her upbringing as poor – “resourceful” is how she puts it. “I had Tommy Hilfiger clothes that I bought out of a van and we had food,” she says. “Other times, I didn’t have hot water and the lights were shut off.”
She learned to play music on her sister’s guitar and digested any albums she could get her hands on: Pink Floyd, Prince, Elvis. “Growing up how we grew up, everything is a miracle,” she says.
After Jaime died, the family frayed. Her parents divorced and her faith was changed – she lost any remaining desire to cling to organised religion. “I definitely believe there’s more to waking life than what we can see here. But do I believe that Jesus and God are white people that live in the sky and judge us? No,” she says. “But if you want to believe that, have fun with it.” As she grew up, she became aware that people were capable of far worse than judgment, especially in the US south. Goat Head, a song on Jaime, details the time someone slashed her Black father’s tires and left a goat’s head in the back seat.
“Being [in the south] is so conflicting, because it’s in my blood,” she says. “And my ancestors have been around since before it was incorporated. Who’s to say that this isn’t my home just because of my colour, or my background, or my sexuality? This is mine, just as much as it is the good ol’ boys’. So how do we work it out together? I don’t know, but I think that plays out on this album.” A sense of finding peace in the unease lingers throughout What Now.
Howard wrote the bulk of the album during the pandemic, a time she describes as “a dark gift” for someone accustomed to being on the road. She had married the musician Jesse Lafser in 2019 and moved to New Mexico, but they divorced. She soon found herself falling in love again; the album’s opener, Earth Sign, was written as a “witchy idea of a prayer” to find a soulmate – and it worked. (She keeps the details of this relationship to herself.)
While the world was suffering, she was happier than she had been in a long time – maybe ever. “They’re telling me to hide and fear my neighbour, to be suspicious,” she says of Another Day, the song that tackles this dichotomy. “But, at the same time, I’m falling in love. Somehow, among all this destruction and fear and chaos, I’m still OK.”
Howard has a peaceful life in Nashville, where she lives with her pets and takes walks in the park. After our interview, she will drive off in her rugged, fishing-ready truck and have dinner in town with friends. She likes the normality and doesn’t want for much, short of a 1988 Dodge Plymouth, which was her first car, inherited from her great-aunt. “I feel like the only job I have in this life is to explore my own creativity,” Howard says. When she shared a meal recently with Joni Mitchell at an event honouring the songwriting legend, they talked about animals and art, not music. “She was so lovely,” says Howard. “And she felt just as awkward as me, like she had never gotten used to the extravagance they put on us. I really appreciated that, and appreciate her for being so authentic. She did her thing her way and I want to be like that. I want to do my thing my way. I want to be singular.”
Although she longs for a more rural existence, she likes it here, surrounded by creative people and her “queer mafia” community, which includes the musician Becca Mancari. Mancari is a supporting act on the What Now tour and featured Howard on their 2023 album, Left Hand; Howard refers to them as “my little big brother”.
“There is a spoken and unspoken understanding about what it’s like to be two queer musicians of colour in the south,” says Mancari, who was briefly in a side project with Howard and Lafser called Bermuda Triangle. “The music that we make together and separately matters deeply. Knowing and loving Brittany is like getting a glimpse into the unknown. It’s almost like touching the miraculous, but then it’s also like being with the most real person you have ever met. Seeing Brittany create sounds from literally a cardboard box in her living room makes you feel like there are no rules.”
Cardboard boxes, a plate of forks and an empty water jug all served as instruments on What Now, which Howard co-produced with her longtime collaborator Shawn Everett, percussion provided by the jazz drummer Nate Smith. Howard and Everett did things in the recording process that Howard describes as “questionable”. Techniques and ideas that shouldn’t have worked and probably break music-school rules give the album its texture; the bin opposite the couch on which she is perched was employed by Smith (“literally playing trash!” Howard says, with a squint of delight). The lyrics evoke one feeling while the music evokes another, mapping unpredictable human emotions.
Red Flags assesses her accountability in the failure of a relationship, while Prove It to You is a love song that sounds near industrial. At its core, What Now just asks questions: about partnerships, about death, about a world that can be more cruel than kind. “I’m one of those people that goes to therapy,” Howard says. “I do the work and examine my own self. And it’s patterns, man: why do we end up in the same situations over and over again? I wasn’t willing to keep ending up with the same recipe. And that’s not just [about] one person, either. It’s something I’ve been doing since my 20s. I’m just exiting the cycle.”
This understanding of her flaws is reflected in the very way she sings: “There are times on this album when I don’t correct my voice. It’s not perfect. It’s strange sometimes. Sometimes it’s a little off. Or maybe I’m lisping. That’s just me. That’s who I am, take it or leave it.”
The album’s last line, wailed by Howard, is: “I can’t believe I’m all out of rainbows,” followed by the call of a trumpet. It is an unresolved finish perfect for a world that doesn’t provide a path through the turmoil; we have to find one ourselves. “That’s how chaos comes,” Howard says. “It comes all at once. And it makes you uncomfortable. That was the whole point – that all these things can exist. There’s no neat ending and this isn’t a perfect record. It’s called What Now … there’s always gonna be some shit going down. Who know’s what’s going to happen next? Those are the times to play.”
What Now is released 2 February on Island Records
• This article was updated on 11 December with corrections: Alabama Shakes performed Don’t Wanna Fight at the Grammys, not Hold On; Howard has 16 nominations and five wins overall. What Now was recorded in RCA Studio A, not B.
