‘He Loves Me’: How Brittany Howard found God through music
It’s the things that we love the most that we usually have the most complicated relationship with. When you love music, if you sit with a guitar and can’t get it to sound like you want, you feel like this powerful thing has escaped you. Equally, when you are religious and have a close relationship with God, if bad things then happen, you can feel as though your faith is wasted. Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes has experienced both of these things, but her relationship with the two things she has a spiritual connection with survived in the face of tribulation.
Far be it for us to get into a philosophical and spiritual debate about whether God is real and, if so, why ‘He’ allows bad things to happen, but this is a valid question that many have asked over the years. If we have an omnipresent creator, why does he allow things like war to occur? Why do people die young before they have a chance to witness His green Earth? Why do bad things happen to good people?
Brittany Howard found herself pondering over these questions following the death of her sister. The Alabama Shakes lead singer lost her sister when she was just 13 from a rare form of eye cancer. Howard and her family were previously religious, but this turn of events naturally left her family questioning what they had done to deserve such a cruel set of circumstances.
“I am definitely not into organised religion, but I’m definitely a spiritual person and when my sister got sick and passed away, my whole family was ripped away from the church,” she said, “We all were questioning why God would do something like this […] I had a very gothic period in my life, from year 8 to 20. I was very unsure about the whole God thing.”
It wasn’t until she started making music and performing in a band that Howard was able to reconnect with her faith. “When Alabama Shakes started happening, and I got to travel and meet new people and experience incredible things, I started having this relationship with something higher, greater, other,” she said, “It makes me feel so much more positive and aware of my own spiritual freeing.”
Music has always been able to bring people closer to their spiritual beliefs. The Bible says that our vocal abilities are a direct result of our relationship with God, which is why so many churches use their voices to sing worship songs that bring people closer to God. The track ‘He Loves Me’ is Howard’s own interpretation of this idea, as she had the instrumentation and decided to use the lyrics to write about her ongoing relationship with God.
“I thought God had intended to hurt us or punish us, but I later realised that I found God in music and I found God in my voice,” she said, “I learned that He always had a plan for myself and my family. That is what ‘He Loves Me’ is about. It is my greatest realisation that He has never left me. All those years that I had turned away, I was still receiving His absolute love and forgiveness.”
