The Mix
9 | ROLLING STONE | J U LY 2 0 1 9
DAVID RICHARD/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCKB R I T TA N Y
HOWARDFAST FACTS
HOT ROCK Howard had trouble writing
the LP — until a 104-degree heat wave
came. “Whenever I’m uncomfortable,
things come easy. When I did [2012’s]
Boys & Girls, I lived in a haunted house.”
OBAMA-APPROVED Howard sang “Heav-
en Help Us All” for a thrilled President
Obama at a White House Ray Charles
tribute concert in 2016.L
ast year, Brittany Howard
called a meeting with her
bandmates and told them some
news they probably didn’t want to
hear. Alabama Shakes — who met in
high school, broke through with 2012’s
“Hold On” and went on to win four
Grammys — would not be recording
a follow-up to 2015’s Sound & Color
anytime soon. Instead, Howard would
be making a solo album. “It was like,
‘I’m going to do this record by myself,’ ”
she says. “I knew that I needed to be in
control of everything: the music, the
arrangements, all that stuff. And when
am I going to do it if not now?”
Howard’s solo debut, Jaime, is her
most ambitious recording ever, full of
synthed-out psychedelic funk, druggy
soul ballads, hip-hop loops, and lyrics
grappling with her past, including
sexuality, family tragedy, religious
guilt and more. It’s a powerful record:
Howard recalls a recent listening
party where “one lady cried. I’m used
to hearing it, so I’m always surprised
when people hear it and their general
reaction is like,
‘Oh, boy.’ ”
At the time of the band meeting,
Howard had already proved she was
creatively restless by starting two
side projects, Bermuda Triangle and
Thunderbitch. Writing for Alabama
Shakes was more difficult. “It’s just a
labor to get the songs out,” she says.
For her, writer’s block is tangled up
with some of her oldest memories.
“When I grew up, we didn’t have much
money,” she adds. “We lived in a trailer
park. There’s always this part of me
that’s like, ‘I do not want to go back to
the trailer park.’ I still have that belief
system, so whenever something is not
coming easily, I start having those
poor thoughts: ‘Oh, this is it.’ ”
This time, thinking back to the
trailer park actually helped her write.
She moved into a house in Topanga
Canyon, California. Working on her
own, she felt more comfortable writing
about her own experience growing
up the daughter of a black father and
a white mother in Alabama. On the
haunting “Goat Head,” Howard lays
into all of it: “Mama is white and
Daddy is black/When I first got made,
guess I made these folks mad,” she
sings, before asking a question she’s
been asking since she was 13: “Who
slashed my dad’s tires and put a goat
head in the back?” “It felt really vul-
nerable,” Howard says. “But if you’re
gonna be honest, you can’t be just a lit-
tle bit honest.” She thinks turning 30
last fall helped push her to that place.“I had more to say,” she says. “It was
me giving myself permission to tell the
stories that I don’t ever talk about.”
One of those belongs to her older
sister Jaime, the album’s namesake.
“She taught me how to write a song,
taught me how to draw, taught me
about art,” Howard says of her sister,
who died at 13 from a form of eye
cancer. “I’ve always been connected to
her spirit. This [album] was kind ofmy way of doing something together.”
Howard thought about her sister’s
tape collection, where Elvis stood next
to the Supremes. Howard also listened
to Brazilian artist Jorge Ben, who
makes music “where there’s literally,
like, 18 different things happening in
the song.”
For “He Loves Me,” where Howard
proclaims that God still loves her
even though she drinks and smokes
too much weed, she broke up her
verses with portions of a sermon by a
Houston preacher, Pastor Terry K. An-
derson, whom she found on YouTube.
She’s similarly honest on “Georgia,” a
sweet, soulful ballad “about being a
little gay black girl and having a crush
on an older black girl.” In the album’s
press release, Howard discusses her
struggles with questions of identity
growing up:
“In a small town, like where I come
from, different is bad — I never want-
ed to be different.Howard at the
Rock Hall of Fame
induction last year
in ClevelandMy greatest wish was to be like
everybody else.”
Throughout the album, Howard
sounds relieved at the chance to
speak her truth. “If people like the
record, that’s amazing,” she says. “I’m
just proud that I made the record.”
She plans to tour with the people
who helped her make it, including
keyboardist Paul Horton (who has
toured with the Shakes) and Shakes
bassist Zac Cockrell, “because to me
he’s, like, the best bass player.”
As for the band that made her
famous, even Howard isn’t sure
what its future is. “We’re a family,”
she says. “Those are my bro-bros for
life. But right now they’re just
letting me do my thing. If I did the
same songs and the same every-
thing, I’d be so miserable. I’d be so
bored. I wouldn’t care about heaps
of cash, swimming in a cash
swimming pool. It does not matter
to me.”