34 | PHOTOGRAPH BY Magdalena Wosinska
Brittany Howard’s Bathtub Escape
WHEN BRITTANY HOWARD
first began touring the U.S.
with Alabama Shakes circa
2010, she’d steal a few mo-
ments in the grimy tub of the
band’s shared Motel 6 room.
Later, as the band became
a Grammy-winning success,
she’d enjoy a finer soak. “It’s
the place at the end of the
day where I am all alone
and grounded in comfort,”
says the singer, 31. “I like to
picture all the stress going
down the drain.”
Howard, who released
an excellent solo debut last
year, makes sure to ask about
the bathtub situation wherev-
er she’s traveling now. “These
hotels, a lot of them don’t un-
derstand how important it is,”
she says. “They’ll say, ‘Yeah,
we’ve got a bathtub’ — and
then it’s a bathtub-shower
combo, which to me is not a
bathtub. That is for children.”
Last fall, Howard created
@candlegazing, a secret
Twitter account devoted en-
tirely to rating the bathtubs
she encounters on the road.
Her handful of followers are
treated to reviews of tubsthat range from the pitiful
(“Yawn,” reads one devastat-
ing review; “some calcium
buildup under the faucet,”
reads another) to the sublime
(Manhattan’s Hotel on Riv-
ington is her gold standard).
She uses a one-to-five scale,
guided by straightforward
criteria like “Location” (“I
don’t want to be staring at a
toilet”) and less obvious qual-
ities like “Loneliness” (“If it
has two headrests, that’s just
reminding me I’m alone”).
Howard has endless
ideas on the subject oftub improvement, and she
dreams of one day designing
bathtubs herself. “Some-
times, they make them a little
narrow,” she says. “I need to
be able to flip around several
times, like a dolphin coming
out of the ocean.”
But ultimately, Howard
doesn’t think she’s asking for
much: a space to relax, talk
on the phone, maybe toss
in a bath bomb (“I do dabble
with Lush”). “Some people
meditate, some people go
for runs,” she says. “I take
a bath.” JONATHAN BERNSTEINMY
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