Alabama Shakes’ Reunion Grew from a Benefit Show into I Must Be Dreaming

Alabama Shakes are a band again, a decade after their last record. In a new interview with Kyle Meredith, Brittany Howard traces the reunion to a Tuscaloosa fundraiser for an old friend whose brewery had been hit hard by COVID. She invited Zac Cockrell and Heath Fogg to join her, then brought them onstage without warning for “Hang Loose” and “Hold On.”

The moment reset something. “It kind of took me back to a place where every music was exciting, the world was exciting,” Howard says. Soon the three were trading demos. A planned three-song EP became seven songs, then a full album, I Must Be Dreaming. Howard says there was no interest in revisiting Boys & Girls or Sound & Color. “We asked each other, ‘What are you into now?’ And we went from there.” The result leans into psychedelic soul and an interior world colliding with a fractured outside one.

That shift did not come easily. Howard admits she resisted writing or singing at first: “I very much wanted to almost disappear because it’s easier that way.” The optimism on a track like “I Feel Hope Coming” is not soft-focus. “There’s no leader and there’s no savior. We are leaders. We are the saviors,” she argues, linking anger and outrage to a demand for collective responsibility.