Brittany Howard Never Set Out to Be a Star

Even with a new album in the works, the frontwoman of the Alabama Shakes isn’t banking on a comeback. She just wants to keep making great music — and save her energy for what matters.

Look: Marakeshi Life, Eyewear: Illesteva, Jewelry: Vintage

Howard was still riding the high of her creative risk-taking with Kumite — and sounding a tiny bit hoarse — when she convened in a Nashville studio with the Shakes in January. They were recording new stuff after all, and heading back out on the road, albeit not at the frenetic pace they used to maintain. Between Howard fulfilling her star duties at the Grammys, where she was part of the group number that opened the show with an L.A. tribute, and the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, where she nailed the molten glassiness of Prince’s classic guitar tone on stage with Miley Cyrus and The Roots, they announced a manageable 36 tour dates for 2025. 

Soon after, Howard and Babcock also sneaked in a week-long trip to Portugal, Howard’s first-ever European vacation. They checked out the bustling capital city of Lisbon, sure, but the countryside was the real draw. “I really just like going to little lesser known villages and stuff,” Howard explains, while preparing me a cup of Moroccan mint tea in her kitchen. “I like looking at the flora and fauna and meeting the little old ladies. Just the wholesome stuff, I guess.”

At this point, she has her priorities pretty well settled. A seasoned pro, she’s seen — and rejected — the sacrifices the music industry demands and the limited roles that pop music has historically reserved for Black women. (As passé as that rockist way of thinking may seem, recall that Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner published a book of conversations with the performers he considered to be the most important voices of the rock era — white men, all — just three years ago and, in a New York Times interview, defended his exclusion of Black or female artists with his sweepingly dismissive and absurd assessment that they weren’t “articulate enough on this intellectual level.”)

Howard has experienced what it is to be part of the zeitgeist, but she’s also built something sturdier and less solipsistic than full-blown stardom. She’s fought, in her low-key way, to preserve one of the most precious parts of her engagement with music since her youth — the inclination to pursue her interests wherever they lead, without having to pay any commercial dividends. Kumite wasn’t her first rabbit trail; before it came the theatrically tough and bluesy hard rock of Thunderbitch and the shambling folk conviviality of the trio Bermuda Triangle. Even her two solo albums, accomplished as they are, feel like works of discovery. She delights as much in lightheartedly unrefined beginnings as she does in furthering her musical mastery. 

“I think I was put on this earth to create, and yes, to also sing and stuff, but just to play and experiment,” she tells me. “And I’m just gonna keep doing that. It hasn’t led me wrong yet. So when it comes to things like fame and fortune or whatever, I think I’ve had a near enough glimpse of what that really is, and I’d rather not. You don’t belong to yourself anymore.”

She’s been revealing herself at her own pace. That process is ongoing. There have been no jarring reversals, just an ever more richly textured portrait coming into view. On stage, she’s become a confident and deeply attuned conductor, guiding the entire room through her music’s immersive movements. Now she’s at ease in all manner of celebrity company. She came away from that most recent Grammy gig with a new fishing buddy, country star Brad Paisley, whom she hadn’t met until they shredded side by side. “Now that I’m a little bit older and a little more established, I actually get to take the nerves off and just meet people for who they are,” she observes. “And that’s been really cool. It’s really expanded my horizons.” 

She’s still a country person at heart, but one who’s well versed in cosmopolitan ways. And a diehard Southerner. And a budding community organizer. And a comfortably successful musician who turned to Transcendental Meditation to work through her deep-seated fears of losing it all and winding up back in poverty. And a queer woman, once married, who’s taking another chance on love. And a medieval history enthusiast, with one Ren Faire under her belt, who’s fascinated with folklore invented to explain scientific and medical phenomena that no one understood at the time. And a songwriter who’s crafted at least a few tunes worthy of a place in the American songbook. She contains multitudes — and in 2025, as the nation’s leaders try to enforce their binary view of just about everything, that makes her outlook more inviting than ever. “I think being multifaceted and being authentic is the greatest form of resistance at the moment,” she says with conviction. “I don’t think things should be black and white. I don’t think we should throw people away because we think they’re wrong either. I think that’s just another form of being black and white about it.”

From the moment Howard entered the spotlight and began giving interviews, there’s been fascination, verging on fetishization, with where and how she grew up, in a workingclass, racially blended home surrounded by farm animals and a junkyard down a rural road on the edge of Athens, Alabama. What tends to get lost is that she was hardly blind to her family’s economic limitations, but recognized that she had imaginative resources worth guarding and cultivating. 

“I mean, if you ask either one of my parents, they’ll always talk about how I was unstoppable and uncatchable,” she says with evident pleasure. “And if I wanted to do something, I would just find a way to do it. Anything that you want to exist as a child, you just make it up in your head.”

“As I got to be a teenager, that never left. Some kids turn into teenagers and then all their focus is on the opposite sex. How do I look good? How do I get so-and-so to notice me? I didn’t give a damn about that, probably because I didn’t know I was gay at the time, but I was just, like, focused.”

Her studiousness manifested itself in selfguided dissection of musical recordings and attempts to make her own. She used a desktop computer that had been donated to her late sister Jaime by the Make-a-Wish foundation — Jaime died of a rare form of eye cancer when she was 13 — and often borrowed crappy guitars. “I didn’t even have my own gear,” says Howard. “So I felt like every little thing I could collect, I would do the most I could with it.”

That’s how she planted the seeds of her belief in creative limitlessness, and it fueled her through her draining post-high school years. She’d work long hours for low wages and sacrifice sleep in order to cram in rehearsals and shows with the band she’d formed with three local white guys — Cockrell, Fogg, and drummer Steve Johnson — who also had day jobs. “We all kind of came from different backgrounds,” Howard notes. “We found a certain type of music we could all agree upon.” They’d all played classic rock, metal, and soul covers in other gigging outfits, and shared her desire to switch to original music. But none of them had banked on their self-funded recordings going viral the 2011 way (via a widely followed music blog posting their song), getting them signed and putting them on the radar big-time.

“We weren’t thinking that other people were really ever going to hear it,” notes Fogg, in a separate interview, “especially on the scale that came to be.”

The Shakes hailed from an hour west of Muscle Shoals, whose modest recording scene, powered by an interracial crew of homegrown studio talent, lent a sinewy, humid feel to a slew of venerated ’60s and ’70s pop, rock, and soul recordings and became the subject of towering lore. Artists who want to get gritty and soulful for an album still make pilgrimages to record there today. That impulse to try and squeeze the old spirit out of that setting wasn’t the Shakes’ mentality at all, and yet they were pegged as revivalists, as well as potential saviors of a rock genre seen as languishing in obsolescence. Their Grammy-nominated Triple A radio hit “Hold On” — from whose chugging, loose-limbed groove Howard launches impatient, eruptive exhortations to persevere aimed at herself and everyone else in earshot — was crowned the best song of 2012 by Rolling Stone, which declared that Howard’s performance “reincarnated the ghost of Sixties rock and soul” and the rest of the band was “steeped in the stew of Muscle Shoals and Stax-Volt.”

But the Shakes’ debut album Boys & Girls, which included “Hold On,” didn’t have the self-consciousness of a group that cared about recreating a template. Fogg’s and Howard’s interlocking guitar lines formed odd, jangly thickets. And she sang like she was way out on the edge, looking toward vistas the rest of them couldn’t yet see, and giving voice to longing so profound that she was just beginning to explore it herself. Rarely did she take a predictable, linear path to a song’s crescendo. Already her pacing and phrasing felt shrewdly daring. There was really no formula to her approach, she recalls, other than changing things up: “Like, how does this make it a little bit more interesting than This is a soul song?”  

Historian Charles Hughes — who measured the renown of Muscle Shoals against the reality that it wasn’t exactly the interracial utopia that it was made out to be in his important book Country Soul — clocked the perceptions projected onto the Shakes from the start. “I don’t think it’s coincidental that that was right at the beginning of the Obama era, that was right at the beginning of this sort of resurgence of a post-racial idea. And that’s not anything to do with them, certainly, but it was, I think, very common to project a certain kind of nostalgic narrative on them musically, but also then to project this idea of this sort of interracial promise that the culture was already primed to recognize Muscle Shoals as being a part of.”

And that narrative, Hughes recognized, was too narrow to encapsulate where the Shakes, and Howard especially, were headed. “What I always hear her doing, is trying to push against what those traditions mean, and also what traditions we think of her as part of,” says Hughes. “And I think that she insists on a level — and I mean this in the best way — of a kind of weirdness. She does not do this very rigid retro thing, and she never has.”

Meanwhile, Howard was getting to travel the world for the first time. She very quickly tipped from being wide-eyed at the exposure to new experiences to letting them enlarge her perspective. “I met a lot of people who thought different, talked different, spoke lots of languages,” she recalls. “And then I’m over here like, Oh, I thought America’s the greatest place in the world. But this is pretty good. These people have health care. These people can speak four languages. It kind of blew my mind at a young age, a pretty formative age. I had a lot of thinking to do, deprogramming to do.”

When I first spent time with her at her Athens, Alabama, home in early 2015, her mind was set on dispelling a different set of assumptions. Too often, the full scope of her musical contributions to the Shakes had been minimized by outside observers, as though she simply gave powerful performances and relied on the guys for the guiding sonic vision. That wasn’t remotely the case, of course. And after I’d spent the better part of a day with the Shakes as they tried to make each other laugh with deadpan quips at her kitchen table and ventured out to a local, family-style restaurant for lunch, she led me down to her basement.

There sat a desktop computer. Howard began opening files that contained demos she’d created for the most otherworldly tracks on the Shakes’ second album Sound & Color. I’d already listened to the final versions, and it was striking how close to completion she’d gotten them on her own, teasing out the templates for rhythmically furtive and unpredictable drum patterns, oblique guitar lines, and shapeshifting, multilayered vocals. The album was a band effort, an enticing sonic challenge they’d embraced, but it was evident to me that she’d led the way into this knotty, forward-looking territory. Some of Howard’s song lyrics had Afrofuturistic qualities, blending sci-fi and Southern imagery to depict visions of distant, liberatory realities. “Some want to see those who’ve gone above, friends that they’ve lost, people they love,” she mused during “Future People.” “I’d rather meet the me down the road, to lead me through the fog.” That profession of faith in her self-revelatory potential would prove prescient. 

The Shakes were glad that the album they’d made challenged the notion that they were only about throwbacks. Even if Sound & Color ran off a handful of purist fans, it also debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, won Grammys, and brought on endless touring. But as they reached new heights in the industry, Howard experienced a profound sense of dissonance. “There was a certain point,” she recalls, “where I was like, Wait, why am I not happy? That’s crazy. This is everything I’ve always wanted. And I had to ask myself a lot of questions.”

She decided putting the brakes on the Shakes’ continuous ascent and stepping out on her own was how she’d find answers. It’s fun to consider that trajectory alongside the career of the fictional character she plays in the 2024 animated Netflix kids film Thelma the Unicorn, a cautionary tale about the cost of compromising for the sake of fame. Thelma, voiced by Howard with just the right amount of wry punch, is a barnyard pony whose musical gifts go unnoticed until she takes on the appearance of a unicorn and gets thrust into the pop music machine. A shady manager gloms onto her as his next cash cow, separates her from her real friends, and replaces her self-written stuff with lyrics spit out of a ludicrous vending machine–sized AI song generator. And for a time, going along with it pays massive dividends.

“Where me and Thelma’s paths diverged,” says Howard, who’s slightly amused by how far we’re taking this comparison. “Thelma kind of got lost in it. She was getting her teeth done and straightening her hair and had a perfume out and was doing this terrible music just because it made some coin. And she wanted to be a star.”

“During the Sound & Color days or whatever, yeah, we could have done the most and been not ourselves and been more famous and got more money and all that stuff. After seeing the movie, I’m like, Yeah, I’m glad we didn’t do that.”

Rather than whetting her appetite for acting, Howard’s first role made her contemplate how much she’d enjoy scoring an entire film someday. Several Shakes songs have landed in movies, and she just wrote a country blues number with film composer Ludwig Göransson specifically for Ryan Coogler’s period horror Sinners. It’s also apparent during our interview that there are grander possibilities on her mind.  At one point, as a mix of music she’s currently into plays on the stereo, a soundtrack by Italian great Stelvio Cipriani crescendos dramatically. She apologizes and turns it down.

But where a film composer generally accompanies and accentuates without stealing the spotlight, since going solo in the late 2010s, Howard’s brought her individuality into focus. When the Shakes were active, people seldom pondered the viewpoint of the lyrics, or thought of Howard as saying anything at all. That was partly due to biases baked into critical assessments of music since the 1960s, when the work of verbose, white bards became the standard for so-called consequential art. There was also Howard’s thorough commitment to being part of a band, as opposed to singling out her still-developing perspective. Back then, she probably wouldn’t have worn the gray hoodie she’s sporting during our interview. The front bears the motto “No One Is Illegal On Stolen Land,” and the back has a pithier message: “Fuck I.C.E.”

Howard points out that the two-sided strife she sings about in “Don’t Wanna Fight,” a song from Sound & Color, was automatically interpreted as a relationship matter. Really, it was about being fed-up with the struggle to survive at the poverty line. “You don’t wanna fight no more just to buy some milk and bread,” says Howard. “Your body shouldn’t be in a trauma response just going to work.”

It was clear from the title of her 2019 solo debut, Jaime — named for the late, elder sister who was, and remains, a creative inspiration — that Howard was increasingly leaning into autobiography. Over the course of 11 loose-limbed, capriciously funky tracks, she reveals things she’s come to know: that religious dogma isn’t her bag; that she loves women and is a true romantic; that her mixed race identity is a form of multiplicity that racists, including those who once vandalized her family car, refuse to tolerate. There's brilliant economy, and a certain poetic playfulness, to her word choice.

When she shaped her second album, 2024’s What Now, she made the most of her Transcendental Meditation practice and of the contrast between her lyrics’ leanness and the maximalist music that enfleshes them. And lest there be any question who was responsible for her wildest stylistic sprawl to date — quiet storm to avant-garde jazz to house music — or the phenomenal calibration of those shifting moods, she paired the title track with a video in which she isn’t the protagonist, but the virtuosic auteur, gazing upon and directing the action from above. “What made What Now interesting to me,” she explains, “was that it was very orchestrated in the music. But then also, I’m just getting my point across.”

That doesn’t mean that her point was simple. There was a bit of a heartbreak-and-healing subtext to the album, and Howard dared to engage in an uncommon level of self-scrutiny. If the typical posture for a pop kiss-off is the riled victim unloading on the undisputed villain, she was telling a more complex story. “I didn’t know love could feel like that,” she marvels in one line of the churning, deconstructed dreampop number “Red Flags,” preparing to make an admission: “I ran right through them red flags. I ran right through them.” 

Jacket: Balenciaga, Dress: Eloquii, Hat: Esenshel, Sneakers: Converse, Eyewear: Howard’s Own, Rings: Stylist’s Own

Howard has yet to release an outright protest song. She’s more prone to address the emotional and psychological burdens of living under political realities. “13th Century Metal,” a mind-bending mashup of breakbeat, psychedelia, and speech-making, originated as a phone note she tapped out for her own benefit, to restore her sense of agency when President Trump was first elected. It feels like a pledge to live out her ethics and emotional intelligence. “I promise to think before I speak,” she begins, splitting the difference between Civil Rights-era preacher and literature prof. “To be wary of who I give my energy to, because it is needed for a greater cause. Greater than my own pride. And that cause is to spread the enlightenment of love, compassion, and humanity to those who are not touched by its light.” 

Then there’s “Another Day,” rubbery, Princeified, Afrofuturistic funk-rock envisioning and inviting the future she wants for all of us. Her guiding question is, “Can I just imagine a place where maybe one day we could just be? We could just be happy to be outside, and to be with each other and be next to each other. And share our earth, take care of our art, tend to it. And just have a future where it doesn’t have to be so greedy and so toxically masculine. It could be a little looser, a little more flowy. Not everything has to be a fight.” 

Her What Now tour incarnated a little taste of that. She designed it to be an enfolding, unfurling experience. Her jazz-steeped drummer, Nate Smith, powered through dramatic musical transitions with intricate, galvanizing grooves, songs trailed off into the ringing of sound bowls and she — regal and resplendent in a caftan — beckoned us into her vision. “To me, it felt almost like a play,” she reflects. “I’d like to explore more of that in the future for sure. It’s costly. But creatively, it’s so satisfying.”

But that may be an aspiration for Howard to pursue on her own. Right now, she’s returning her attention to the Shakes. “I think I needed to do my solo project, almost like having a walkabout, get to know and understand yourself better,” she reasons. “And I got time to do that.”

Cockrell was along for that ride. On stage and in recordings, he anchored the rhythm section with his fluid touch. He also enjoyed the downtime with his family, which is now, like Howard, based in Nashville.

Johnson’s no longer in the lineup. His former bandmates speak gingerly of their parting of ways during the hiatus. “I think it’s just we kind of grew apart,” was how Cockrell put it to me. 

Fogg stayed in North Alabama, raising his kids near his parents and grandparents. “My priorities are my family before anything else these days,” he says. “I’ve kind of settled into dad life.”

He’s done some side projects, and pulled in Cockrell. But until the band resumed jamming recently, Fogg’s primary contact with Howard has been email threads and the cards she’d send in the mail. “I think Brittany being so active gives us opportunity,” he muses. “I’ve always felt that, in this band anyways, and I think Zac would probably agree, too. We get to kind of be the truest form of ourselves because Brittany’s comfortable in the spotlight, whether it’s professionally or in our personal lives or playing on stage in this band. I think we’re all thankful for what Britt does. If it weren’t for her solo stuff, people might not be talking about the Shakes stuff still.” 

They're bringing an accumulation of experience and perspective to this reunion. Each has come to value the chance to control their schedule and carve out time for what matters to them. And after Howard’s self-actualization journey motivated her to express more of her thoughts, it’s not like she’s bottling them back up as they come up with new material together. “It’s probably more personal than the prior two Shakes records, for sure,” says Cockrell. “I think it’s just crept into her writing style at this point, and it’s just open and putting it all out there.”

Howard affirms: “I’m still going to talk about things that matter to me. And the guys are always going to back me up. I mean, we all have good hearts and we share that in common. So I don’t think I have to change or put curtains around what I really mean.”

At the time of this writing, the Shakes are not yet ready to let anyone hear their new recordings, which puts me in the awkward position of asking them to describe what they sound and feel like. The responses I get — that they’re sort of picking up where they left off with Sound & Color; that they’re not aiming for anything in particular so much as finding their way together again; that what they’re coming up with feels fresh to them — is probably all accurate on some level, but still leaves things ambiguous. 

What I feel confident in saying is that neither Howard nor her Shakes bandmates are all that interested in catering to the nostalgia market. Other reunited bands promote the fantasy that you can relive your glory days. There’s money in that. “I feel like when the three of us are together, we rarely talk about the past very much,” Fogg observes. “I mean, some things, of course, like funny stories. But I think it’s just fun to try to make weird music with your friends, you know?”

“I have no nostalgia goggles on,” Howard makes clear. “Here’s the thing. Every time I make anything new, it’s a little different than what I’ve done before. It’s a little further out in the exploration zone.”

She’s seen inspiration sputter out when other artists head into the middle portion of their careers, still relying on stale moves. Why repeat herself when she can conceive of so many possibilities? If Brittany Howard can be said to have an artistic ethic, it’s that she won’t let herself get stuck. “I mean, I’ve already been,” she once sang-spoke with casual, bluesy impatience during “History Repeats.” “I came and went. I washed my hands with it. I don’t wanna do it again. 

Jewly Hight is a music writer based in Nashville. Over the last two decades, she’s contributed to NPR, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Billboard, and countless other outlets; written a book about visionary women’s voices in roots music; contributed essays to other collections; created a podcast that tells the story of the Black-led movement to make space for R&B and hip-hop scenes in Nashville’s live landscape; and appeared as a talking head in numerous other podcasts, shows, and documentaries. She was the inaugural winner of the Chet Flippo Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism, is currently Senior Music Writer for Nashville Public Radio, and competes in trail ultramarathons all over the Southeast.

Kendrick Brinson’s portraiture and documentary work explores the fabric of community through the connections, landscape, and personality that makes these places unique. Her first monograph on the joys of aging in Sun City, the world’s first retirement city, will be published in 2026. Brinson lives in Atlanta, with her husband, photographer David Walter Banks.

Courtney Mays is the founder and principal stylist of The Parker Mays Collective, known for her transformative work as a wardrobe stylist and image consultant. With a deep understanding of design, culture, and social impact, she curates an elevated, story-driven style rooted in diversity, authenticity, body positivity, and representation. Her notable work includes styling Chris Paul, Sue Bird, and Breanna Stewart, as well as leading creative projects for the Met Gala, State Farm, Brand Jordan, MLS, and countless others. A graduate of the University of Michigan in Art History and African American Studies, Mays has been featured by Nike, GQ, Vanity Fair, Sports Business Journal, and The Hollywood Reporter.

Subscribe to The Bitter Southerner

Democracy Forward

Bold Truths Book List