Alabama Shakes returns with a new album after 11 years and a reunion at a craft brewery gig

NEW YORK (AP) — Alabama Shakes has returned with the band's first album in 11 years and it turns out that craft beer played a big part in the reunion. Not drinking it, exactly.

Singer and guitarist Brittany Howard was chilling following her second solo album, 2024's “What Now,” when she was contacted by Bo Hicks, the co-founder of the Druid City Brewing Company in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

He asked her if she might come and perform, helping the brewery's bottom line and a local food pantry along the way. Sure, replied Howard. Hicks, after all, had taken in the band members and fed them long before the Grammy wins.

Howard reached out to her Shakes bandmates — guitarist Heath Fogg and bassist Zac Cockrell — to see if they wanted to get together and rehearse some songs. Of course, they did.

“So that’s what we did, and it felt pretty nice,” says Howard. “Then we were like, ‘Well, should we do this again? Should we do more? This was nice.’ And it did snowball after that.”

The snowball ends this month when the Shakes unveil “I Must Be Dreaming,” an 11-track album none of the members initially intended to make but one that felt right, a mixture of love songs and wry social observations.

“I did approach this differently, and I found that I did have kind of surprising things to say — things in me that I didn’t know were quite there,” says Howard.

“Watching these songs transform into a full album was just remarkable. I mean, everything around this group to me feels a little bit miraculous,” she adds. “I’m just very excited to share our work with everybody.”

One highlight is the track “I Feel Hope Coming,” an unabashed political song with a whiff of Curtis Mayfield. “I don’t want your martial law / I want clean air,” Howard sings, before coming to a happy thought: “I feel love coming / I feel hope coming.”

“I’m looking at the world around me, and I think we all feel like everything’s chaotic and sped up, but I feel like the resistance is finding joy, still finding peace and still finding a center,” she says.

“I do feel hopeful, because people are waking up to the world around them. And the lies that have been told to them to keep people in line, doing what the powers want them to do. And it’s all changing now.”

Other songs include the teasing love song “Garden,” which draws on Howard's love of the natural world. “If you don’t water your garden I will,” she sings to a rival. “If you don’t show her you love her, I will.”

“When I think of love, it is kind of like a garden,” says Howard. “You’ve got to put work into it, and don’t start it if you’re not going to take care of it. To me, they’re kind of one and the same. So I just wanted to frame a love song that was a little mischievous.”

Justin Eshak, co-chairman and CEO of Island Records, says Howard and the Shakes are pushing forward sonic boundaries at a time when much of the rest of the music world is looking backward.

“Brittany Howards don’t really come along very often,” he says. “We’re obviously running a business, but you leap at the opportunity to work with Brittany Howards, not just because it sort of feeds the soul.”

Alabama Shakes didn't exactly break up. They just sort of quietly disbanded. After their 2012 debut “Boys & Girls” and the 2015 follow-up “Sound & Color,” the trio just stopped.

“It was time to take a break,” says Howard. “It was very important to all of us to protect the band and the music we love to make with each other. I think it was time to just let it be for a second. Not everything has to be a race to the top. Not everything has be a big bucket that you fill with money. Sometimes you just care about what you do and that’s enough.”

In the interim, drummer Steve Johnson, who had a child abuse charge that was dismissed against him in 2021, left. Howard put out two solo albums and Fogg had his own, under the name Sun on Shade.

When they reunited for the brewery, the idea was to write a few new songs and tour. But Cockrell had a load of demos and it turned out they had eight songs altogether, so an album was within reach.

“I’ve found that we’ve all grown up and we’re much gentler, more sensitive people, which has been like a wonderful surprise,” she says. “It feels new, it feels fresh again.”

The band is currently on a North American tour that will take it from Tanglewood to Radio City Music Hall, the Santa Barbara Bowl to the Ohana Festival.

Howard's favorite song on the album is “Tea Time,” a hypnotic slow burner built over a chunky Cockrell bass line and melody by keyboardist Paul Horton where Howard sings: “I’m building a kingdom / In my soul / Where the fires first burned / Let flowers grow.”

“Something about it was both ancient and unknown, but super-familiar. I heard it and it reminded me of feudalism, serfism, and I knew exactly what to do with it. So I pictured all these medieval scenes and I kind of imagined me now living in that time,” she says.

“Everyone wants safety, and I think, at the end of the day, everybody wants to lay down in peace and dream a better day for their loved ones. I just wanted to sing about the possibilities of maybe we could figure out a way to do that.”