Interview: Alabama Shakes Talk Sound & Color, Spotify, & Keeping It Close to Home

By: Daniel Gerichter (@ZenDonut) –

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he past few years have been good for Athens, AL’s Alabama Shakes, a band whose members are all in their early-20’s. Their album Boys & Girls received universal acclaim, Grammy, Q, and BRIT award nominations, and winning an Americana Music Honors award, meanwhile the band are world-renowned for their absolutely smoking live show.

With their new album Sound & Color, they return to the spotlight and even though they’ve played for large crowds, sold millions of records and become indie rock heroes, they remain grounded in their rootsy origins. Founder (and bassist) Zac Cockrell fondly recalls the simplicity of his life before gaining notoriety, betraying any pre-conceived notions of a “rock star” attitude. In the vast ocean of country-tinged rock bands, being that humble goes a long way to make a difference.

When it came time to start recording Sound & Color, what were the most important lessons the success of Boys & Girls taught you?

It taught us to only make a record if we were happy with it. That’s what we planned on doing anyway, but we got a lot of different opinions from people we meet after Boys & Girls came out. They weren’t all label people, either – just folks who said “you should try adding this or you should be more that. I love hearing what people think, but we followed our gut so much on that first album [we wrote, recorded, and produced Boys & Girls independently] that we learned to go with what sounded right to us on the new one.

Already, there’s an obvious expansion of your sound on Sound & Color. How did the band go about setting the stylistic tone for this album?

We never really sat down and laid things out that technically when we started working on it. Almost all of the tracks were built on demos we’d done in the past, or ideas Brittany (Howard) had been working on. We did it on a song-to-song basis and worked dialing them up to a point where we all loved and enjoyed them. It’s an organic process, but it really works for us.

What were some examples of things you had to do to dial them up?

With some songs, we’d see that something wasn’t there on guitar or drums at the mixing stage, so we’d play the song a few more times just to get the sound we needed. Sometimes, even after toying around a while, we’d find that we actually got it right in the first take, so we’d end up going with that. Just having the luxury of time to really fine-tune every little blip and bleep made a huge difference.

Blake Mills (producer) has a diverse production and collaboration history, working with artists like Julian Casablancas and Kid Rock. In hindsight, what did you hope he would bring to Sound & Color?

Our biggest reason for wanting to work with Blake was hearing Heigh Ho [Mills’s 2014 album] while he was recording it. The whole thing just blew us away. That guy is just as connected to production as he is to songwriting and because of that, his album had an extra layer of depth to it. All of us listen to it constantly and we’re always finding new things about it that amaze us. So we hoped he would be able to add that extra layer to our album.

Did he deliver?

He really did. Throughout the whole process, he was just a great sounding board because he was always straightforward with us. He’d tell us when something was working really well, but he’d also let us know when we were overthinking it.

How has the growth you’ve experienced affected your songwriting?

It’s a little different from the last go-around because we don’t get together to practice twice a week like we did before we were a touring band. With the first album, we’d been practicing that material so much before we ever got into the studio, so it was just a matter of tracking and mixing it. With the new record, we had to work backwards. We had demos and stuff, so we had to flesh it out, practice it in the studio a bunch till it made sense, and then record it.

Alabama Shakes will release their new album, Sound & Color, on April 21st.

Roots and country-influenced rock has moved well outside of being a niche genre, and pretty much universally accepted in the mainstream. Why do you think that is? What do you think caused that shift?

It’s hard to pinpoint where it started, but it’s definitely more mainstream than any of us have ever seen it before. I think people really started to pay attention to that sound was the Van Lear Rose album by Loretta Lynn. I think when people saw how involved Jack (White) was [White produced the entire album], they started paying more attention to the people who made that music great to begin with. So you had a whole new generation listening to Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash, which is going to affect the kind of songs they’re writing.

A stripped-down, old school sound like yours seems to resonate more with this generation than with previous generations. Why do you think that is?

I think it starts and ends at the internet. If people hear Jack White’s working with Loretta Lynn, they don’t have to head down to the record store to hear her older stuff, they can just Google it and hear it right then and there. Also, in a lot of towns, you wouldn’t have even had the option to discover lots of new music any way. Where I grew up, the local record store was a Best Buy. I always tried going to find interesting new bands, but I just gave up after a while. So when you could go online, I was all over that.

Was that part of the motivation to release an exclusive version of Sound & Color for Record Store Day?

That was definitely part of it. Where I’m from, there are some record stores popping up in the surrounding towns, so the area is catching up. For someone who’s trying to expand their horizons, it’s important to have a place that helps you do that, so we hope we can help people get out to their local record shop more and get something extra out of it.

In an age of streaming on services like Spotify and social media, word about Alabama Shakes travelled in a grassroots way, whether through the media, or just your live reputation. What do you like/dislike about emerging technology as a promotional tool? How do you preserve that organic, grassroots development for Sound & Color?

If someone told me as a kid that we could perform in our living room and have the whole world hear it in real time, I wouldn’t have believed you. It gives artists more power than they’ve ever had before so I don’t see any problems with it. For us, the easiest way to promote ourselves outside the internet is to have a great live show. That’s what I’m most looking forward to this year, actually. I’m excited to get this material onto a stage every night and playing it for people. We’ve become so familiar with it in a closed setting over this last year, I can’t wait to to tighten it up on stage.

Brittany gets a lot of media attention (as many front-people do). How do you guys keep the rest of the band in-focus?

Brittany really does get a lot of attention and I feel bad for her sometimes. It’s hard for her to go to the store or to just be out in public because so many people recognize her, but I still think she’s great with all of it. She’s a genuinely friendly and decent person, so she’s just herself with the fans. And it’s important for us to remember: some of those people wait for hours to meet her and for us, we’ve been music fans our whole life, so we get it. To help her out, we’ll just take walks with her and maybe say ‘hi’ to some of the people approaching her as well, just to give her a moment to breathe (laughs). All of us know that it means a lot to them so we want to make them happy. It’s not a lot out of our day and we have some cool fans, so we all enjoy getting to know them.

From your formation in high school to your incredible success today, the story of Alabama Shakes is pretty much the rock and roll dream come to life. Which parts of your pre-success lives were the hardest to drop? What parts were you ready to leave?

I actually loved the job I had. I worked at an animal clinic for a few years. It was something that also made me really happy. The people were like family and I really enjoyed the work I did there, As far as what I don’t miss? You’d think that being musician means you can sleep till whenever you like, but most of the time I have to be up much earlier than I ever did working a 9-5 (laughs). Plus, I get less sleep than I did then! You’ll be playing a festival or a show that goes till 1 a.m. and by the time you’re actually in bed it’s 3. You make your own schedule, but that schedule’s exhausting. But I think for all of us, the hardest part of life as a touring band is having to say goodbye to your family and friends for these long periods of time. Of course, the flip-side of that is how good it feels to come back home.

Alabama Shakes plays Field Trip at Fort York in Toronto on June 3rd. Buy tickets here.