Brittany Howard

Brittany Howard didn't sleep so well last night. Wilma’s fault. Wilma is one of the two female dachshunds (the other is Wanda) who skitter around your feet the moment you step into her home, set back from a quiet road in East Nashville. “She was upset,” Brittany explains. “She’s just not happy with her beautiful kennel, with a very soft, expensive dog bed.”

Some nights, some days are like that. A few weeks before my visit, Brittany had posted on Instagram – on the account she has been using, in her idiosyncratic way, to boost anticipation for her second solo album, What Now – that each morning when she awakes she consults her inner child to ask who she should be on that particular day. Not today. “I just woke up and was like, Look, let’s take a shower, Brittany. Different kind of day.”

Yesterday, though. If I’d been here yesterday…

“It was like a French Riviera type of day,” she says. “All white, with a nice little carpenter’s jacket over. A little bucket hat moment. Like I owned
a cigarette boat.”

I am momentarily confused.

“Speedboats.”

She offers up these details – this all in the first few minutes of making each other’s acquaintance, as we seat ourselves in the closed-in porch at the front of the house – almost as though it would be absurd not to think this way.

I murmur, approvingly, that she has some interesting neurons connecting.

“I sure do,” she says, smiling. “You don’t know the half of it.”

I ask when she realised that she maybe came at some things differently from other people.

“I think I’ve always had a suspicion,” she replies. “I always thought maybe I was a late bloomer when I was a kid, because I always looked at other people and they always seemed to just know what to do. And I always felt like the outsider looking in on a situation, trying to learn from it: OK, this is how you do this. Just like, you know, humans.”

The adventures of Brittany Howard out in the world of humans – that’s what we’re here to discuss. In recent years, judging from their outward manifestations, these seem to have proved increasingly fruitful. You get a few clues both to who she has been and to what has happened simply by casting your eyes around her living room. Most obviously, there’s an eclectic gallery of musical touchstones. In pride of place above the mantelpiece is a photo of Nina Simone; to its right is the sleeve of Sade’s second album, Promise. “This is a Sade household,” Brittany declares, as though further words would be wasted. On the walls, there are framed signed photos of the gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (this from 1949) and of David Bowie; a floor-to-ceiling painting of the Supremes, once part of a series lining the walls of an early Nashville gay club (she knows someone who has the Judy Garland); a photo of Brittany alongside the Obamas with Denzel Washington taped onto the image and, separately, a framed note from the couple – “A little letter here from the president,” as she puts it.

On another wall there’s a large print by the photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks. It shows two Black girls ankle-deep in muddy water in what look like their best dresses, playing, one carefully tipping something from her own cup into the other’s. I’ll later research it a little: the image was taken in Mobile, Alabama, in 1956, when Parks was on what proved to be a perilous assignment for Life magazine, shooting a series on segregation in the South. At one point, Parks would write in his memoir, they left a town called Anniston by back roads just before “unknown to us, the townspeople had become aware of our presence – and they were on the way with rope, tar and feathers.”

Brittany doesn’t refer to any of this, and the image itself oozes a private innocence. She says that the instant she saw the photo she felt a connection. “I knew they were in Alabama. It reminded me of me and my sister, because that’s how we would play. We didn’t have no...” She doesn’t find the final word to this sentence, and maybe that’s the point. “Look at them. They just obviously got back from church. It just reminded me of my childhood, so I needed it.” Brittany grew up in the Alabama town of Athens. “Grew up on a farm and in a junkyard. Both. I don’t like to use the word ‘poor’, but I grew up very resourceful, I’ll say. And my sister was very sick. And I was living in an interracial household” – her father, KJ Howard, who ran the junkyard, is Black, and her mother, Christi Carter Golden, is white – “and the town wasn’t very welcoming of us. I was ADHD as a child, so there was not enough stimulation ever.” Brittany’s sister Jaime died at 13, when Brittany was eight, of retinoblastoma. (Brittany had been diagnosed with the same hereditary cancer at birth but was treated successfully, though she lost some vision in her left eye.) Not long after, her parents split up.

The path from there to here was evidently not an easy one. “Listen, we all discover ways to survive in life,” Brittany tells me. “When I was coming up, it was: Feelings don’t pay the bills; how I feel about my situation has no hand in getting myself out of this situation. That’s what it was. Very much survival-based thinking. I was like, I need to be quick. I need to be smart. I need to be resourceful to get over this hill. And unfortunately, in America, when you’re right at that poverty line, it’s hard to get out of it. I’ve been there. And I feel like I contend with feelings of – what’s the word I want to use for this? – scarcity. I contend with it still. It’s just barely there any more. I’ve done a lot of work on that. But I was always so afraid.”

Her way out was through the band she became part of, Alabama Shakes. People may well have taken the first two lines of their breakthrough 2012 single, “Hold On” – “Bless my heart, bless my soul / Didn’t think I’d make it to 22 years old” – as generic pop-song melodrama, but it was desperation transcribed from real life. “I was working and not making enough money and was absolutely hopeless,” Brittany says. “I was like, This is my life? Is this my life? This is the best I can do? I mean, I remember writing that song. I used to be an outdoor janitor picking up trash, working in a work truck. And I remember driving up Green Mountain in Alabama and writing the lyrics to it. Just the essence of it.”

And then her life changed. “That’s why I worked so hard when I was with the Shakes,” she says. “Like, too hard, probably. Because I was so afraid it was going to go away and then I’d be back where I was. And I did not want to go back to where I was. That desperation, and the prayers and the hope that maybe something miraculous would happen – and my surprise when it did!” The memory draws out a warm laugh.

Over two albums, Alabama Shakes sold plenty of records and won plenty of awards. But when it came to writing a third album, Brittany found herself in a bad place. “I wanted to keep the thing going, but it just wasn’t coming to me any more,” she says. “There’s nothing I could do about it. And it created this misery. At the time I didn’t even think I want to do music any more, that’s the depths of how bad it was.”

People assumed there must have been some kind of schism between the band members, but Brittany insists there wasn’t and still isn’t. “People just can’t fathom that I would do something like that [leave the band] because of a little something like creativity,” she says. “I felt guilty about that for a really long time, because it’s always been kind of hard for me to advocate for myself. It was the most difficult decision I’ve ever made.”

Instead, in 2019 she released a solo album, Jaime, named after her late sister, a record rich and diverse, remarkable in terms of both its musical scope and its personal storytelling. Brittany gave interviews talking about what seemed like her happy present-day – usually including the story of falling in love with fellow musician Jesse Lafser and moving with her new wife to New Mexico in 2018 – and about the tendrils of her past. The song that garnered the most attention, “Goat Head”, drew on one dark, long-buried incident.

“When I was young, maybe 11, my mom wanted to teach me about my Black ancestry,” Brittany says. “It was just this forethought she had. She wanted me to be connected to my African ancestry. And she was like, ‘We’re watching Amistad, we’re watching Roots.’ And I’m glad she did that. And she was telling me stories about what it was like for her having brown children in the town we were in. It was terrible. It was really sad the way people treated my mother. Heartbreaking. Because there weren’t a lot of mixed children in our area when I was born. So she was treated badly. White women would walk up to her in the grocery store and shame her. They would be like, ‘What were you thinking?’ Doctors would treat her differently. They’d be like, ‘Why’d you do that? What were you thinking? Marrying a Black man – what are you doing?’ ”

But even then, one story was too horrific to tell. Only when Brittany was a teenager did her mother relate what had happened one night early in her relationship with Brittany’s father-to-be. “My mother was staying in this apartment complex. My father got home from work, stayed over. When they woke up, his car was all beat up. There was a goat pasture next to the apartment complex, and someone got one of those goats and decapitated it. And put it in my dad’s vehicle. Slashed his tires, bust his windshield, all this stuff.

“I kind of had, like, rose-coloured glasses on because I was seeing my town was a very diverse town: Black folks, Mexican folks, white folks, poor folks, rich folks, Indian folks, Korean folks. We had all kinds of different people, right? I just thought that’s how it was. But that’s not how it was. That’s not how it was. It kind of blew my mind. Because I thought: Not this town. This is my home.”

Still, the story was just a stray memory, a tale her mother had once shared, until one day in the studio it simply leapt out, unbidden, from Brittany’s mind and Brittany’s mouth into a song. A song she would call “Goat Head”. Afterwards, she had to telephone her mother to double-check that what she’d remembered was true. But of course it was.

As for Brittany’s father, she has never explicitly discussed the incident with him.

“My dad just said, ‘I like that song,’” she says. “Me and my father, I don’t know if we have those types of ser-ious conversations. We almost have a psychic conversation that’s inaudible. Does that make sense?”

And in those terms it’s been much discussed?

“Yeah, it’s been much discussed and healed. Psychically.”

Brittany moved into this house during the pandemic. To begin with, the constrictions somewhat suited her. “I’m perfectly happy alone,” she says. “But after a year I was like, Now I kind of miss people. And I miss things about people.” There is something gloriously delightful in the way she further specifies the kinds of humanness she missed: “Like, people cussing at each other. Like, honking at each other. Just being people, just peopling. Walking around and realising they’re going the wrong way and having to turn around. Things like that.”

Not that she was here entirely on her own. At the centre of What Now, largely written during that period, are two opposing emotional arcs. Four of the songs map a love affair’s disintegration, in ways often jarring and candid, and three are rhapsodies to the birth of a new love. Arriving here today, what I know from recent articles about Brittany is that before the pandemic began her marriage had ended and a new relationship had begun.

The most brutal of the four end-of-love songs is the album’s title track, a raw dissection of a relationship that isn’t working. Brittany explains it to me as a declaration in song of uncomfortable truths left unsaid in real life. “Sometimes what I do in a relationship is I don’t speak up for myself,” she says. “Which sounds ludicrous considering what I do for a living. I should be loud. But I guess it must be something I learned when I was a kid. And I would get into relationships and become smaller until I’m almost disappeared. And for some reason I found that comfortable. And so what I’m writing in these songs is all these things I never said.” With “What Now”, Brittany wrote the music first. Then, as she often does, she simply played back what she had written, microphone in hand, and – as both participant and observer – waited to see what would happen. “This is the funnest moment to me,” she says, “because I don’t know what’s going to come out. I just hit record, and then I started singing those lyrics. I sang the first verse.”

That verse started out blunt enough – “I don’t wanna confuse u for fulfilment” – and finished with the lines
“I wonder if I’m here just so I’m not alone / It’s painful but I might as well say sorry.”

“And I just stopped it, sat back on my chair, and I was like, Oh my God.” She decided it was too much. “I was like, I don’t think anyone should hear this.” She recorded a different first verse. It now ended: “I wanna treat you better, you’re so beautiful / I won’t let what I don’t know destroy me.”

And that’s where she left it.

Much later, in the recording studio making her album, she pulled out the half-done song to consider whether she should finish it. And now she knew: that revised version was a failure of courage. “I decided to put those punches back in,” she says.

Completed, “What Now” went further and much deeper. “You’re fucking up my energy / I told the truth so set me free,” she sings. And “I don’t wanna get used to all the tension /I don’t wanna worry what kind of mood you’re in / I don’t wanna fall for your potential.” It’s not just brutal but brutal in unusual and interesting ways. At one moment she sings “My heart wants to stay but I don’t know what for / I can’t have it always thinking for me,” which, as I point out, runs against all standard pop-lyric counsel that you should get out of your own way and let your heart make the decisions. “That’s right,” Brittany says. “Does our heart always know best? Should we always follow our heart? I think it depends on what kind of trouble you’re getting in.”

The most savage line of all comes at the end, when she sings “It is what it is – I guess I’m sorry? / But I ain’t sorry.” When I mention this, and how rough it is, she roars with laughter. “Yeah, brutal pop song. I like the juxtaposition.”

As open as Brittany seems in her songs, it turns out she also has some expertise in playing her cards close to her chest. Initially, discussing these songs with her – both the falling-out-of- and the falling-in-love ones – I presume they mirror closely the real-life arc I described above, and take her disclaimer “I’m not usually just talking about one person” as no more than a means of providing a kind of necessary wriggle room. But it slowly becomes clear that things really may not be so clear-cut – and, indeed, that the past history people may already assume they know isn’t quite right. As I sit here with Brittany, trying to make sure I understand the vague timelines involved, when I ask if she can give me a sense of when she and Jesse Lafser broke up, this is her reply. “I can’t remember,” she replies. “It was before Jaime came out for sure. Before that record.”

So when you were giving interviews then, you were just sort of sliding around that?

“Sure was. You gotta do what you gotta do.”

It’s a pattern that may already be repeating. An interview published a couple of days before I visit her clearly implies that she is in the relationship whose early moments seem so empathically captured on the new album. But, again, when I double-check, Brittany smiles and shakes her head.

“No.”

Feeling awkward about what I’ve stumbled into, I say that I’m sorry.

“That’s OK. That’s quite all right.” She laughs. “It was a beautiful time. Yeah. Seasons come, seasons go. Seasons change. I can let it go.”

That was some time ago, she explains. For the last three months there has been someone else. And if that complicates the matching up of the emotional arcs on her record to those in her life, that’s probably just as she’d prefer.

Brittany leads me to the studio she keeps in a large shed. There’s more art here – “I like Black religious figures because, obviously, Jesus is Black,” she announces – and a bust of Elvis Presley wearing a translucent turquoise wig.

Leaning on a high window frame above is her handmade placard with the letters B, L and M from a 2020 Black Lives Matter march in the city. She says she’s proud of coming from the South and of living here. “I don’t want to be pushed out. This is where I was born. This is my home too. This is a queer Black woman’s home as well as Governor Bill Lee, you know what I’m saying?” (Lee is Tennessee’s Republican governor.) “The South – this belongs to me as well. I can’t just run because it is hard.”

At her mixing desk, Brittany pulls up the demos of various songs from What Now. She taught herself how to play music: drums, bass, guitar, piano. Later, she taught herself to record and engineer. She builds up tracks in here but says she often writes at the kitchen table on her laptop. She plays me the demo of “Power to Undo”, written in the Nashville house she rented at the beginning of the Covid lockdowns. “I just played the drums on this shitty metal desk inside of my rental house.” The inspiration comes when it comes. “Usually when I’m making music, whatever frustrates the shit out of me, it’s usually the next thing after that that’s good,” she says. “When I’m trying too hard, that’s usually when it sucks.”

Earlier, I had asked her what she considered her talent to be, and she had replied, “First and foremost, resourcefulness. First and foremost. In the studio, on stage, on the road, in my house, in my lifetime, in conversation. Everything is: I can make something out of nothing. I learned that just growing up how I grew up. Number one talent. And then number two… I mean, people say I’m a great singer, and I really appreciate that. But it’s like, I don’t really consider myself a singer. That’s not how I would classify myself. I would say I’m a creator.”

Though the centre of her new album is dominated by hymns to broken and new relationships, they are flanked by two songs that offer further context. The first, “I Don’t”, which comes after an introductory mood piece, is so beautiful – swathes of 1970s-ish soul floating like a confection of sweet clouds – that I wonder how long it will take many listeners to hear it. “I like when something sounds one way and it’s talking about another,” Brittany says. “Like doo-wop groups from the 1950s – they have this beautiful harmony, and they’re singing this pop song about someone getting in a car accident.”

“I Don’t” has very few words. At its centre is a question and its bleak answer. The question is “Does anyone remember / What it felt like to laugh all night / And sleep in late / And not worry about anyone or anything?” The song’s response – her response: “Well, I don’t.”

“Haven’t most of us felt that way, though?” Brittany says. “Like there’s something you shouldn’t talk about, a feeling that you shouldn’t talk about. You should be grateful for everything you have. But it’s, like, still there. And it’s this almost intangible numbness.”

The album’s final song, “Every Color in Blue”, returns to the same theme: “That dull cloud coming in / On the horizon, I feel the rain / But it’s all out of rainbows.”

“I’ve had depression since I was so young,” she says. “It’s just been my life. And it wasn’t until I was much older that I was like: Wait, I don’t think everybody feels this way.” She laughs softly. “And wanting to write about it. Because that’s letting people in. And I like to put it at the end of the album, because when you listen to the album again – it’s a short album – when you listen to it a second time, it colours all the songs. It’s different, because you know me now.”

“What I’m writing in these songs is all these things I never said.”

On Brittany Howard's primary public Instagram feed, the one I mentioned earlier, she posts under the name blackfootwhitefoot. “I’m proud of my heritage,” she says. “I’m half Black, I’m half white. I’m very honoured that I am one of my ancestors’ that gets to be seen and heard on this earth. Because there’s a whole line of people in my family that have never been seen, never been heard, never had nothing.”

But Brittany has another public Instagram page. Well, public insomuch as it’s not private, though nothing officially directs people towards it. When I’d asked Brittany how she pictured herself at her happiest, she’d replied, “Outside, catching a big old fish.” This other page’s name is brittanybefishing. On it, she intermittently posts pictures of herself holding fish she has landed.

“I grew up fishing,” she says. “As a kid I spent, like, every day outdoors, being outside, being with animals. And I spent a lot of time by myself. It was just me and nature and animals. And maybe because that’s where I felt most comfortable as a child, now I feel most comforted being outside and away from civilisation. It’s nice. You’re outside, you’re in the water. And you have this skill. I fly-fish. You have to study the water to know what kind of fly to use – like, the lure. And if you get it right you get this huge dopamine rush. And then you look at this beautiful little creature. You look at it and go, ‘That’s a nice one.’ Then you put it back. It’s a meditation. You don’t even have to be good at this. You don’t have to be good at anything. All the pressure is off, really. You don’t have to catch a fish to survive. You’re lucky if you even catch a fish, honestly.” On the left as you walk to the studio is her boat. Her first boat, bought during the pandemic. It is, for anyone who might understand what this means, a 16-and-a-half-foot Lund V-hull. “It’s a boat with a motor on the back,” she explains. “It’s a tiller boat. It’s a musky boat. I don’t know if you know what a musky is.”

I concede that I do not.

“It’s a fish with teeth. Terrifying fish. You want a lot of room, so it doesn’t bite you when you get in the boat. It’s basically an alligator that’s a fish. Yeah.”

She bought the boat on Facebook Marketplace. “I was like: This is my first boat. I want a fixer-upper.” She drove the three and a half hours to get it and sat with the owner, his wife and his dogs while he showed her photos of him catching muskies before they all went to the bank together to do the deal.

There’s something about what happened next that maybe says plenty about who Brittany Howard is and how she came to be that. First, she called a guy who probably could have fixed what she needed fixing. But she didn’t like how that call went. “He was going to upcharge me. I could hear it in his voice. I used to sell used cars. This guy had a woman on the end of the line, and he was like, ‘Oh, lifting the motor… That’s going to cost about XYZ.’

“So then,” she continues, “I got into electronics, started learning how to do electronics, and I rewired this whole boat and fixed the engine on the back. So you got to have tools, right? So then you got to buy the tools, and you got to watch a YouTube video on how to use the tools, right? So I spent hours and hours and hours fixing my boat up. I loved it. Those are the best days of this year, fixing that boat.”

I ask her whether she realises how unusual that all is.

“I’m an unusual person. This ain’t usual. It’s me.”

She likes being home these days, Brittany tells me.

“I’ve a very chaotic life,” she says, “and I just want my adrenal glands to grow back. Tell my nervous system to chill out. I don’t like travelling. I’ve had enough in this lifetime already.”

She’s far from unappreciative, though, of what her music has brought her and continues to bring her. “Having fans is incredible,” she says. “It’s amazing. When I’m on the road, all these people, they love you and they want to hear from you, and they want to sing with you, and they want to yell for you and cheer for you. I’m looking forward to that and to seeing what songs resonate with people the most.”

So soon enough, she’ll be back out there, doing just that. And not alone. On the sleeve of What Now, Brittany’s head is surrounded by a wild explosion of hair, and these days she has taken to wearing the same wig when she performs live. “The wig’s named Raquel,” she explains. “I feel more like a performer when I wear a wig. Raquel’s like my Sasha Fierce, you know what I’m saying?”

That’ll be when she’s engaging with the world out there. But what draws her more and more, she says, is what happens after.

“I’m a little older now, and I’m just like, What sounds nice? A farm. Growing carrots. That sounds nice. Growing flowers. Something predictable. Sounds nice. I’m a normal person. I don’t do anything – what’s the word? – extravagant. I got cats, I scoop their litter boxes, I feed the dogs, I take them on a walk. I’m just a normal person. What’s going to be for dinner tonight? This is the age-old question.”

It seems rude not to ask her what will be for dinner tonight.

“Fuck,” she says, pondering this. “You know, there’s some beef stroganoff I’ve been looking at in the cabinet. Some Hamburger Helper. You know what that is?”

I confirm that I do. (It’s a popular American supermarket staple: packaged pasta and dried sauce in sundry varieties which, when liquid and minced meat are added, combines to form some version of the dish advertised – in this instance, beef stroganoff.)

“It’s a delicacy where I’m from,” she says. When we go through to the kitchen, she takes the Hamburger Helper out of the cupboard and sets it on the counter, ready. “The name brand, too!” she points out. “These days, nothing but the best.” (Anyone foolish enough to feel as if they’ve almost got Brittany pinned down might want to know that she says this while wearing a hat from New York’s Met Opera and pivots to rhapsodising about their recent production of La Bohème.)

Conversation flashes all over the place. Before, she had described herself to me as “a creator who is hungry to create many, many more things outside of music – just want to create things until I die.” She mentions that she’ll soon appear as a voice actor in Thelma the Unicorn, a film by Lynn Wang and Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess. “I’m also an inventor,” she tells me matter-of-factly. There’s a particular invention, something to do with kayaks, that she doesn’t want to talk about until the patent process is completed. There is also – probably just a momentary sideline, though a vivid one – a series of fairly terrifying handmade figurines called Kissy Dolls that she and Zac Cockrell, the Alabama Shakes’ bassist, who also plays in her band, created in idle moments on her 2023 autumn tour (“Now with REAL hair!”). And then she’s preparing herself, and readying Raquel, for everything that will come with the release of a new album.

“This a strategy,” she declares at one point, “to buy the land and get the tractor. I want the nicest land to grow my cabbages.” Which sounds both a bit like the truth and a bit like the kind of bluff we all need to keep ourselves moving forwards.