STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Fans of the band Alabama Shakes have learned to listen for this voice.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DON’T WANNA FIGHT")
ALABAMA SHAKES: (Singing) My line, your line, don't cross them lines.
INSKEEP: Wow. It's the voice of Brittany Howard, whose group won numerous Grammy Awards. She continues experimenting with rock, soul and more on her second solo album, "What Now", coming out Friday. Here's Jewly Hight of Nashville Public Radio.
JEWLY HIGHT, BYLINE: Brittany Howard was 23 years old when the Alabama Shakes' debut album sold half a million copies, considerably more than most new bands can hope for. The Shakes' 2015 follow-up took the rock, soul and roots leanings to futuristic, otherworldly places and topped the Billboard 200.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALABAMA SHAKES' "GEMINI")
HIGHT: A dozen years later, Howard is still seeking musical ideas that are not quite like anything she's heard before, and she's found them at least partly at home.
BRITTANY HOWARD: So right now we're in my studio in Nashville.
HIGHT: In a detached garage with walls painted a vivid yellow.
HOWARD: It is my favorite color of marigold. I have a beautiful old Italian couch in here. Lots and lots of rugs on the floor, upright bass, guitars everywhere you look, and lots of black religious art.
HIGHT: Howard's living a radically different reality from her rural Alabama youth.
HOWARD: I grew up on a farm in a junkyard, way off the road in the country in a single wide trailer.
HIGHT: She cooked at chain restaurants, bagged groceries and delivered mail on remote back roads, all while devoting every possible minute to rehearsing with the Alabama Shakes. When their sound caught on around the world, she traded one kind of relentless labor for another.
HOWARD: I was always working, working, working, working, working, working. I had this fear within me that I would lose everything because I was somehow still stuck in the times where I couldn't even buy groceries, or I didn't have lights on, or I didn't have hot water. And I was always thinking, I don't want to go back to that, I don't want to go back to that - I'll do anything. And that ran me down.
HIGHT: When the pandemic brought Howard's breakneck tour schedule to a standstill, she could focus on being creative, and she made impressively intricate demos with a combination of vintage gear and computers.
HOWARD: Let me turn the rocket ship on.
(SOUNDBITE OF SWITCHES FLIPPING, COMPUTER STARTING)
HOWARD: Let's see if this will play for us.
HIGHT: Howard never made her personal experience and perspective a focus of the Alabama Shakes, but that changed when she stepped out as a solo artist. Her first album under her own name, 2019's "Jaime," invoked memories of her family facing racism and losing her older sister. All of that, along with her internalized fear of slipping back into poverty, moved her to start therapy and get into alternative medicine. Now Howard's brought insights she gained to her songwriting and grown notably more introspective.
HOWARD: I got to a certain age where I was like, I really want to unpack this stuff and work through it so I can just, like, feel better and be better.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
HOWARD: (Scatting).
HIGHT: Howard was just singing nonsense lyrics in that initial blueprint for her album's title track, "What Now." In the final version, she examines her role in the disintegration of a romantic relationship. She dares admit in this verse that she stuck around not to try and make it work but to stay comfortable.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHAT NOW")
HOWARD: (Singing) I've been learning lessons I didn't wanna know. I wonder if I stay because it's comfortable. I wonder if you notice I ain't trying.
This is my journal. This is how I took part in this situation. This is how I participated in breaking my own heart.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHAT NOW")
HOWARD: (Singing) I told the truth, so set me free. If you want someone to hate, then blame it on me. Just blame it on me, blame it on me...
HIGHT: Howard says that turning 35 last year freed her even more from what little worries she had about what people think. She's found herself venturing into styles she had not explored much before, house music, dream pop, avant-garde jazz.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SAMSON")
HOWARD: (Singing) I'm split in two. I don't know what I want to do. I'm split in two. Should I stick with you? I don't know how I'm gonna choose. I'm split in two.
HIGHT: On her new album, Howard even features the practitioners she'd gone to for alternative healing.
HOWARD: That's where I was introduced to these crystal sound bowls and transcendental meditation to create space, like, in my head.
HIGHT: They brought the singing bowls that she'd found so calming to a recording session in a historic Music Row studio. Now the bowl's crystalline tones cocooned her listeners between songs.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRITTANY HOWARD SONG, "RED FLAGS")
HOWARD: And so I thought, well, these sound bowls can be the ground, and they can connect everything. They can bring you back down to Earth so I can take you somewhere else again, right?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EVERY COLOR IN BLUE")
HOWARD: (Singing) Here comes that feeling we don't talk about.
HIGHT: That's a window into how Brittany Howard's imagination works. No one places limits on it but her, and you never know where that might lead, which is why it's thrilling to follow along. She's always asking the question, what now?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EVERY COLOR IN BLUE")
HOWARD: (Singing) On the horizon, I feel the rain. But it's all out of rainbows.
HIGHT: For NPR News, I'm Jewly Hight in Nashville.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EVERY COLOR IN BLUE")
HOWARD: (Singing) You don't see my injury. You don't see the energy it takes me. You don't know...
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