Culture
18 Jan 12

Shake, Rattle & Roll

In 2011, stars didn’t come much bigger than Adele and Bon Iver. Now meet a band who’ve already got both artists in their fan club. The Alabama Shakes are a soulful blues and rock outfit from – you guessed it! – Alabama, who’ve already earned themselves a devoted following, despite forgoing every pop trend in the book.

With new albums from Katy Perry, will.i.am and Ke$ha on the way in 2012, nothing’s going to stop the synthesiser from being the most frequently heard sound in pop, but at least with Stateside soul quintet The Alabama Shakes around, we’re guaranteed to find the product of classic rock instruments somewhere in the charts.

Thanks to frontwoman Brittany Howard’s unforgettable wail (we can only assume her parents are Otis Redding and Tina Turner) and shout-outs from a few celebrity fans (more on those later…), the Shakes are already shoe-ins for newcomers of the year. It’s been mere months since they quit their day jobs, so I’m assuming it took a while to adjust to their seemingly overnight success.
“I think that’s still going on!” guitarist Heath Fogg laughs down the phone line, in an almost cartoonish Southern accent. “It’s overwhelming, it really is! Brittany might not like me telling you this but she basically has an online stalker! It’s not scary but it’s like, ‘How do you handle this situation?’ There are emails all day every day, there are times when it’s like, ‘Oh, this is our job now.’ It’s not a bad thing at all but it’s just like... I dunno... we slept ‘til lunch today and normally I’d be like, ‘I have to get up, I’m wasting the day!’ It’s like a nine to five job, but it’s a five to nine!”
Along with the rest of the band, Fogg spent most of
2011 leading a slightly less glamorous life in his hometown of Athens.
“I was painting houses. We worked 7am to 3.30pm. Usually now at seven o’clock I’ve only been dozed off for a couple of hours! But I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining!”
Fogg, Howard, Johnson and Cockrell grew up in the same neighborhood, but by all accounts, their Southern upbringing was more of a hindrance than a help.
“If there are people writing songs in Athens, Alabama, they’re not really out there doing it,” Fogg laments. “There’s not a venue where kids can go and play original music. I don’t want to say there’s nobody out there writing music, but the four of us were all looking for people who just loved writing and wanted to do it on a regular basis. We were in interviews yesterday and Brittany gave a message to the Mayor of Athens, like, ‘You need to pick a venue where kids can go and play their original music!’”
I’m not sure how tuned in the Mayor is to the international music media, but just by getting their songs on the radio, The Shakes are already encouraging other smalltown folk to write their own material.
“I hope we inspire somebody to start a band, that’s a beautiful feeling for sure,” Fogg says. “Drive-By Truckers were that band for me, they’re from right down the road and they were just heroes of mine. I knew it could be done, it was just, ‘How do you do it?’”
It certainly didn’t hurt to have superstars Adele and Bon Iver hopping on the Alabama Shakes bandwagon.
“Justin was at a show in Nashville at the Mercy Lounge. I didn’t see him, I didn’t meet him, but he was there and he tweeted about it and that’s just crazy to us, we’re fans of his. I think he said, ‘Alabama Shakes are murdering me right now’ or something like that.
“It didn’t surprise me that Adele had heard our music because we were talking to people from Columbia Records and she’s on Columbia, but it surprised me that she liked it and tweeted about it! Our video went up 50,000 views on the day she posted it, so thanks to Adele!
‘It’s strange to be on the other side now, because I’m a fan of bands. I’ll go see a band a bunch of times and know the songs, so it’s funny to think that people are doing that for little old us. That person right there in the front-row who knows what song is coming next, that’s how we are for our favourite bands, like the Truckers.”
There’s still a couple of months to go before the Shakes release their debut album, but the good news is that their self-titled EP is still available, and still sitting pretty as one of the most-downloaded pieces of music on Bandcamp.
“I think we gave a good representation of ourselves with that EP,” Fogg muses. “There’s some true classic R&B-inspired stuff on there. It’s not a retro soul thing, we don’t think we deserve that title ‘cause there’s some people out there doing that for real. We just like to experiment and explore. We just love writing songs and we’re not prejudiced as regards to what we write. There’s gonna
be a lot of death metal on the album, that’s what I’m getting at...”
There’s a short pause on the line, followed by yet another sample of Fogg’s basement-sweeping Southern drawl.
“… just kidding!”