The Alabama Shakes frontwoman put her band on hold for a solo debut dedicated to her late sister and featuring songs about race, sexuality, acceptance.
Their radically more ambitious followup, “Sound & Color,” debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 and earned a Grammy nomination for album of the year . The Shakes had gone from outliers to a group that made the music industry feel good about itself. They were white boys fronted by a towering, barefoot African American soul-shouting lesbian who played a noisy guitar, and if they symbolized Southern rock to many, this was the South of Stacey Abrams and the rock of Janelle Monáe.
The sound of “Jaime,” crunchy, funky and terse, is likely to unsettle some Shakes fans. There’s no sense of region, be it the South or Southern California; the music is the product of jam aesthetics that involve grooves and grit tossed around in the studio and hammered into place. Keyboardist Robert Glasper, who plays on “Jaime,” says it wouldn’t surprise him to hear criticism from certain quarters. “It’s so funny — there’s all this policing when it comes to black music.
And yet, even in small-town Alabama, even in the heart of Dixie, popular culture can give you images of yourself that you don’t find at school. She remembers seeing hip-hop star Missy Elliott when she was growing up, and how she had gained something she didn’t even know she was missing. “Missy’s existence? Changed everything. I’m like,who I’m like. I’m like Missy Elliott. And I felt, well, I’m not bad odd, I’m different good.
Howard is talking casually and calmly about stuff, and she’s laughing: a glorious, almost dirty laugh about how some people can be so wrong. She isn’t as mad as she is amused, and you can practically see her making notes on the world.
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