The best advice Brittany Howard ever received
Across the spectrum of the general population, there’s many different words for it. Conservative boomers would be quick to assign it as “woke nonsense” while more tolerant people may simply refer to it as creativity. But what “it” exactly is, I don’t know. It’s that ethereal quality artists search for in pursuit of songwriting greatness, a feeling that can’t be described as opposed to a bulletproof methodology.
If you still don’t know what I am talking about, then that means you’ve worked out exactly where you exist on me pre-assigned spectrum. What I am referring to is the sort of vague answers creatives give when asked what their inspiration or method of approach was to their art. Answers like this from Brittany Howard who when asked what the best piece of advice she had ever received, explained it was, “actually, from a psychic.” Howard continued, “she told me to ‘Just be’ and not to try to so hard.”
But in 2019, at the point of Howard’s exploration of a solo career, simplicity would have undoubtedly been key. A year earlier, she was seemingly at the top of a musical mountain with Alabama Shakes and their Grammy award-winning record Sound & Colour. The band had mastered a brand of soulful alternative rock and operated as a unit in complete sync with one another, and with that comes the ability to explore textural ideas with relative fearlessness. A pursuit that naturally becomes more difficult when the support system is dropped and you’re understanding your process as a solo artist.
So with that idea came a sense of self-imposed pressure which was eased by her psychic’s mantra of adopting a more simplistic approach. Howard explained, “With this record, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is my first solo record. I don’t want to blow this. I don’t want to bomb this. I’m walking away from something that already works. Why am I doing this?’ So I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to not blow it.”
She continued, “And the psychic said, ‘Oh that’s your problem. You’re trying too hard to write a song. You just gotta be. Just be and the songs will come to you.’” She added, “So I took her advice” explaining that “the more I was relaxing, I feel like, the more I was opening up to any possibilities. Because I wasn’t sitting there, trying to force myself to play a certain type of music.”
While there were obvious parallels to be drawn between the sensibilities of Alabama Shakes and Howard’s solo work, you can also hear where her creativity had been unshackled by new found independence and a trusting in the process. Tight alternative rock gives way for more avant-garde flourishes into jazz and funk, while her lyrics give free reign to explore the mystical.
Regardless of your view on creativity, whether you think it is self-indulgent or appropriate in it’s use of arbitrary language, you cannot deny that Howard’s trusting of her psychic’s process undoubtedly resulted in musical brilliance.
