Alabama Shakes Return After 11 Years With ‘I Must Be Dreaming’

Eleven years separate Alabama Shakes from their last album, and Brittany Howard does not sound like someone in a hurry to close the gap. Ahead of the release of ‘I Must Be Dreaming’, the band’s first record since 2015’s ‘Sound & Color’, she frames the pause as patience rather than absence.

That patience has been tested in stranger rooms. In 2015, Prince invited Alabama Shakes to play Paisley Park and told Howard backstage he would join them for a guitar solo on ‘Gimme All Your Love’. At the agreed cue, mid-set, he did not appear. The band kept the section moving. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna play this riff all night until he shows up’,” she recalls. Then the crowd parted and Prince walked out and took the solo.

Most musicians would keep that as an anecdote. Howard decided to solo with him instead. “To be in the moment, I guess,” is what she takes from it.

There is a line between that instinct and the band’s return. Alabama Shakes formed in Athens, Alabama, and ‘Hold On’, their 2012 debut single, established them around Howard’s voice — guttural, poised, hard to mistake. Looking back on 2015, she notes how much has shifted since. “The economy was different, the pressures of everyday life looked different,” she says. “The news looked different.”

What has not changed, she suggests, is where the writing begins. “There’s this great tapestry inside all of us that is very private and sacred,” she says. “That’s the part we’re all writing from.”