ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
Each week, a guest draws a card from NPR's Wild Card deck and answers a big question about their life. Brittany Howard has collaborated with everyone from John Legend to Miley Cyrus. She also has a celebrated solo career, but her most recent collaborators are old friends. Her band, Alabama Shakes, is reuniting for its first album in over a decade. It's called "I Must Be Dreaming."
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BRITTANY HOWARD: We're all older now, and we're all gentler, and we're more sensitive. And where we are is not necessarily where we were then. And we weren't trying to recreate then. We were trying to get together and figure out, what version of ourself is driving now?
FLORIDO: She told Wild Card host Rachel Martin about the effect that growing up poor in Alabama had on her creative life.
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RACHEL MARTIN: What's a place that shaped you just as much as any person did?
HOWARD: A place that shaped me - I grew up in the woods. My dad had a junkyard, as well. That was a land of creativity. You know, you could open your door and look out and say, like, wow, a bunch of junk cars. Or you could say, like, that is my kingdom for the day. I'm going out there, and I'm going to see what I can see. And some days, there were, like, a castle. Some days there were, like, a lost cove, like, if you're a pirate. Like, so many scenarios could be made up out there in those junk cars, in the woods. And I feel like that's where I really learned that with imagination, like, you know, anything's possible.
MARTIN: When you first started out writing music, can you draw a line from what you were writing in those early songs to the junkyard or images that came to you as a result of that place?
HOWARD: Well, I'm sure, like, subconsciously, everything's connected to the junkyard.
MARTIN: Yeah.
HOWARD: There's something about being, like, one of the poor kids. There's a certain type of fun you can have that is free.
MARTIN: Yeah.
HOWARD: And I learned that very early on, and I feel like when I think of myself and, of course, then the music that comes out of me, it's always, like, from this place of resourcefulness. And it goes all the way back to there, where it's like, the most fun I ever had cost $0.
MARTIN: And the idea of resourcefulness being a fount of creativity is really interesting because it requires you to be creative.
HOWARD: I think it requires you to be creative, and it also requires you to change your perspective, to reframe everything around you. Like, I didn't know I was poor till the other kids said something to me. You know what I mean? 'Cause I was wearing, like - you know, I'd go to the flea market and get the off-market Jordans and the off-market Calvin Klein. You know, it's like...
MARTIN: Yeah.
HOWARD: ...Might be Kelvin Clean (ph). I was wearing that, you know?
MARTIN: Missing a vowel or something.
HOWARD: And I didn't know there was anything...
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HOWARD: I didn't know there was anything wrong with that until I found out. But I didn't really feel bad about myself because I had this whole entire world inside that was just abundant and flourishing. And I thought, maybe those kids just don't have that or something.
FLORIDO: You can hear Brittany Howard on the new Alabama Shakes album "I Must Be Dreaming." You can watch the full conversation with Brittany Howard on YouTube by searching for NPR Wild Card. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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