Before Alabama Shakes were a festival-headlining, Grammy-winning juggernaut, they were the band everyone swore you had to see live. In 2012, just as Boys & Girls was catching fire, they pulled into Louisville for the first time and stopped by WFPK’s studio before their show at the Brown Theatre. The vibe was equal parts humble, chaotic, and electric—the sound of a group who couldn’t quite believe what was happening, but also knew they’d put in the sweat to deserve it.
By that point, the legend was already circulating: people weren’t finding the Shakes through press releases or label hype—they were hearing about them from friends who’d stumbled across a club set, then couldn’t shut up about it. Brittany Howard laughed when I asked if the sudden rise was living the dream. “It’s been surreal,” she said. “We’ve just been getting a lot of practice… maybe that’s why we’re getting better. I hope we’re getting better, not worse.”
It wasn’t some master plan. They were still shocked by the small luxuries: “We have monitors now,” Howard said. “And a sound man. That’s actually a luxury. At festivals sometimes you don’t get those things, and you remember real quick what it was like not to have them.”
Onstage, the band had already built a reputation for getting lost in the music—heads back, eyes shut, vanishing inside grooves that stretched past the recorded versions. For Howard, that wasn’t a trick, it was just chemistry. “When one of us is really in the groove, it makes us feel better. I’m just looking at him like, ‘Dude,’ and then I get lost in that moment. We all help each other do that.” The crowd wasn’t separate, either: “If people start getting into it, then they become part of it. It’s the same thing.”
The recording process for Boys & Girls was just as off-the-cuff. “We didn’t expect anybody to listen to it,” Howard admitted. “Some of these songs were extremely new. We’d track like five of them in one night. We just went in there, it was fun—it was like a project. Hit record and then go back and try to fix a few things. A lot of bad things stayed in there. But they’re very real.”
That realness—loose, imperfect, unvarnished—was exactly what cut through the noise of 2012. While other bands were workshopping singles with producers, the Shakes were hammering out songs in dive bars and living rooms, not worrying whether they’d ever make it to radio. When I asked about the future, the answer was as casual as everything else: “The game plan is just to write whenever we can, wherever we are. And when we have enough material, we’ll just show up in a studio and record it. Probably.”
Of course, history shows they did a little more than that. But in that moment—standing in a Louisville studio, hours away from blowing the roof off the Brown Theatre—they were just a gang of friends who liked playing together, leaving the bad takes in, and letting the rest of us catch up to their fire.
