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86 | Rolling Stone
a murdered Freedom Rider, a preacher perse-
cuted for her gender. “We are the highwomen,
we sing of stories still untold/We carry the
sons you can only hold,” the women declaim
over sparkling guitars. It’s as powerful as
musical storytelling gets.
What’s most impressive about The High-
women, handsomely produced with Nashville
neoclassicist Dave Cobb, is how artfully, and
matter-of-factly, it engages social issues. Credit
the concentration of songwriting talent. Every
woman here is at the top of her game. With
last year’s By the Way, I Forgive You, Car lile
reached a new creative peak after 13 years of
record-making. Morris is a boundary-breaking
pop-country hit machine. Shires is a fiddle
virtuoso and genre-agnostic singer-songwriter
(see last year’s To the Sunset). The not-so-
secret weapon is Natalie Hemby, who’s made
her name as an A-list Music Row writer with
serious range — she co-wrote three songs on
Kacey Musgraves’ 2018 masterpiece, Golden
Hour, and 10 on Miranda Lambert’s landmark
The Weight of These Wings.
Hemby’s got a stoner-friendly wit that loves
wordplay; see “Redesigning Women,” an
anthem that nods to the Eighties Southern-
ladies-in-business sitcom Designing Women,
and “My Only Child,” a nuanced tear-jerker
penned with Lambert and Shires that’s full
of sharp details (“Pink painted walls/Your
face in my locket/Your daddy and me/Your
tiny back pocket”).
The writing’s distributed equitably, and
not every song goes for profundity. “Don’t
Call Me,” a Shires co-write, is a sassy kiss-off
to a leech. Morris similarly boots an unappre-
ciative partner on “Loose Change,” and joins
Carlile and Shires to claim a maternal flex day
on “My Name Can’t Be Mama.” Even the
playful songs have gravity, and vice versa. “If
She Ever Leaves Me,” penned by Shires,
husband Jason Isbell, and Chris “Before He
Cheats” Tompkins, is a queer honky-tonk
ballad delivered by Carlile, who advises a
hot-to-trot cowboy to back off from her lover
— “That’s too much cologne/She likes
perfume.” It’s plain-spoken enough to make
heteronormativity seem abnormal, just as the
album makes anything short of equal
representation feel like both a lie and a
squandered resource.
THE HIGHWOMENB
RITTANY HOWARD is a
Southern rock & roll
radical with a centu-
ries-deep sense of history and
some inspiring ideas about
how to reshape it to fit our
moment. As the lead singer
and guitarist for the expan-
sively retro-minded Alabama
Shakes, she’s combined ga-rage rock, soul, and psyche-
delia. In 2015, she convened
the well-named punk-rock
side project Thunderbitch,
reimagining vintage New York
punk as roadhouse stomp.
Now, she’s put the Shakes
on hold to make her solo
debut (though a couple of
band members are on hand,“History Repeats” opens
by establishing what will
become a theme, sounding
at once ancient and modern
as it suggests a natural bridge
between James Brown good-
footin’, “Kiss”-era Prince,
and Janelle Monáe’s sci-fi fu-
turism. Howard’s voice takes
falsetto flight like Smokey
Robinson on the Sixties soul
pastorale “Stay High,” and the
somberly longing “Short and
Sweet” recalls Nina Simone,
just Howard and a soft guitar
making longing feel intimate
and infinite.
Howard’s newest collabo-
rators here are keyboardist
Robert Glasper and drummer
Nate Smith, worldly jazz mu-
sicians who help turn riffs like
the cosmic boom-bap opus
“13th Century Metal” into
shape-shifting explorations.
The most potent mo-
ments interrogate Southern
traditions in ways that go well
beyond mere musical rein-
vention. “He Loves Me” is an
anthem of lapsed religious de-
votion and personal freedom,
sampling a black preacher
who testifies about a friend
who’s going to live a long
life “ ’cause he ain’t worried
about nothing,” as Howard’s
guitar makes liberated noise
and she praises her personal
Jesus: “I know He still loves
me/I know He still loves me
when I’m smoking blunts.”
And then there’s “Georgia,”
a protest jam for our current
right-wing apocalypse. Over a
sinewy beat and a meditative
organ, Howard sings a forlorn
ode to a state that flagrantly
depressed African American
voter turnout in the 2018
election and recently passed
one of the country’s most
egregious anti-abortion laws.
Howard is mindful of Ray
Charles’ “Georgia on My
Mind,” turning its wistful
nostalgia into something
much sadder. “I just want
Georgia to notice me,” she
sings, confronting oppression
with faint hope. It’s a
strikingly bold moment on a
record that’s full of them.as is co-producer Shawn
Everett, who engineered the
Shakes’ 2015 LP, Sound &
Color). Still, it’s a total depar-
ture, her kaleidoscopic mix
of decades’ worth of R&B,
hip-hop, blues, and gospel,
steeped in trippy laptop
sonics and deeply personal
political urgency.BRITTANY’S VIBRANT SOUL
The Alabama Shakes leader rips up tradition
at the roots on an ambitious solo LP By JON DOLANBrittany Howard
Jaime
ATO
4+++++Classic | ++++Excellent | +++Good | ++Fair | +Poor RATINGS ARE SUPERVISED BY THE EDITORS OF ROLLING STONE.Underdog Psych-Pop Heartthrob Cuco
IN 2016, Omar Banos went viral posting a video of himself playing a slide-guitar version
of Santo and Johnny’s 1959 classic surf instrumental “Sleepwalk.” Recording as Cuco,
the SoCal native maintained that buzz by releasing psychedelia-soaked Spanglish love
ballads that surprisingly struck a chord in young Latinx listeners. On his major-label debut,
Para Mí, recorded on his sickbed after a recent car crash, he sings lines like “Take this and
fly away/Till the substance numbs the pain,” while proving himself a scholar of Tame Impala,
Tyler the Creator, and João Gilberto. The result is a unique blend of burnout soul. SUZY EXPOSITOBREAKINGCuco