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.
Celina Murphy, 18 Jan 2012
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!’”
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