This was kind of my way of doing something together.” Howard thought about her sister’s tape collection, where Elvis stood next to the Supremes. “I’ve always been connected to her spirit. ![]() “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. One of those belongs to her older sister Jaime, the album’s namesake. “It was me giving myself permission to tell the stories that I don’t ever talk about.” “But if you’re gonna be honest, you can’t be just a little bit honest.” She thinks turning 30 last fall helped push her to that place. 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 vulnerable,” Howard says. 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. She moved into a house in Topanga Canyon, California. This time, thinking back to the trailer park actually helped her write. 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.’ ” “When I grew up, we didn’t have much money,” she adds. For her, writer’s block is tangled up with some of her oldest memories. “It’s just a labor to get the songs out,” she says. Writing for Alabama Shakes was more difficult. I’m used to hearing it, so I’m always surprised when people hear it and their general reaction is like, ‘Oh, boy.’ ”Īt the time of the band meeting, Howard had already proved she was creatively restless by starting two side projects, Bermuda Triangle and Thunderbitch. 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 (the album is out September 20th, and she released the new single “ History Repeats” today.) It’s a powerful record: Howard recalls a recent listening party where “one lady cried. And when am I going to do it if not now?” ![]() “I knew that I needed to be in control of everything: the music, the arrangements, all that stuff. “It was like, ‘I’m going to do this record by myself,’ ” she says. Instead, Howard would be making a solo album. 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. Last year, Brittany Howard called a meeting with her bandmates and told them some news they probably didn’t want to hear.
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