NEW YORK (AP) — Alabama Shakes has returned with the band’s first album in 11 years and it turns out that craft beer played a big part in the reunion. Not drinking it, exactly.Singer and guitarist Brittany Howard was chilling following her second solo album, 2024’s “What Now,” when she was contacted by Bo Hicks, the co-founder of the Druid City Brewing Company in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.He asked her if she might come and perform, helping the brewery’s bottom line and a local food pantry along the way. Sure, replied Howard. Hicks, after all, had taken in the band members and fed them long before the Grammy wins.Howard reached out to her Shakes bandmates — guitarist Heath Fogg and bassist Zac Cockrell — to see if they wanted to get together and rehearse some songs. Of course, they did.“So that’s what we did, and it felt pretty nice,” says Howard. “Then we were like, ‘Well, should we do this again? Should we do more? This was nice.’ And it did snowball after that.”
The snowball ends this month when the Shakes unveil “I Must Be Dreaming,” an 11-track album none of the members initially intended to make but one that felt right, a mixture of love songs and wry social observations.“I did approach this differently, and I found that I did have kind of surprising things to say — things in me that I didn’t know were quite there,” says Howard. “Watching these songs transform into a full album was just remarkable. I mean, everything around this group to me feels a little bit miraculous,” she adds. “I’m just very excited to share our work with everybody.”
