Meet the Alabama Shakes

Meet the Alabama Shakes

Shaking up the charts:Boys Girls, the first album from the Athens, Ala., quartet, combines vintage RB grooves and indie-rock ethos in a way that has critics comparing Howard to Amy Winehouse and Tina Turner. The album made its debut at No. 16 in Billboard as an April 3 digital release, climbed to No. 8 when the CD came out a week later and is now No. 11, with 95,000 copies sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Meanwhile, single Hold On has become a top 10 hit on USA TODAY's adult-alternative airplay chart.

Loving what she gets paid to do: Howard never imagined the group would become one of the most talked-about young bands of the year. "I'd always be playing music," she says. "But I thought I'd always have a day job and it'd always be a struggle between doing something you love and having to make a living. I never thought it would be anything like this."

Starting the band: The group got its start in the high-school friendship between Howard and bassist Zac Cockrell. "We were showing each other songs we were writing," Howard says. "We were going through each other's CDs and vinyl." After a few years of writing and recording homemade demos together, Cockrell brought in drummer Steve Johnson, who remembered seeing Howard sing in a garage when she was in her early teens.

"She had developed incredibly over the space of six or seven years and had come into her own. I was blown away," says Johnson, 27. "I knew that if anybody had the potential to do anything really good, she had that."

Finalizing the lineup: The group â€" then known simply as The Shakes â€" played its first show in May 2009 at a Decatur, Ala., club called The Brick, even though its members had worked up only a handful of songs, including covers of Led Zeppelin's Living Loving Maid and The Crunge.

"I was scared, because I'd never done anything like that before," Howard says. "But we knew if we didn't do it, then this was never going to happen. And if we did do it, it opened up all these possibilities that could happen." Heath Fogg, the guitarist for the headlining band, helped out during The Shakes' set and ended up joining the band.

Catching a buzz: An enthusiastic post last summer on the Aquarium Drunkard music blog, which included a stream of the song You Ain't Alone, took the band's reputation worldwide. "The day after that post, I had an inbox of people wondering who we were," Howard says. By that point, the group had begun recording the album that became Boys Girls in Nashville. That fall, the band embarked on its first national tour, opening for Southern rock group Drive-By Truckers.

Too many Shakes: The national exposure necessitated a name change. "There are so many bands called The Shakes that it's impossible to pull up the right information â€" it was a booking agent's nightmare," Howa rd says. "It was going to be impossible for us to be seen or heard if we were named something that somebody else was named. So we just added 'Alabama' on there. We like names like that: We like the Detroit Cobras and the Tennessee Two. And 'Alabama' is a cool word."

Giving up the day jobs: Filling the touring schedule also forced the band members to make decisions about day jobs. Howard, for instance, worked as a postal carrier, while Johnson worked at Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Decatur. "I had already buckled down â€" I had my associate's degree, working on a career," Johnson says. "I had kids. It's a scary decision to make."

The road ahead: After a European tour, Alabama Shakes will open several dates for Jack White starting May 15 in Nashville. "I've grown up with Jack White," Johnson says. "I remember coming home from school, and the first thing I would do was turn on music videos, and there'd be the White Stripes." They're also booked for several summer music festivals, including Sasquatch, Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza.

Having already exceeded her dreams for the band, Howard says she's having a hard time coming up with new expectations. "Some people are going to hate the way we sound. Some people are going to hate the songs. Some people are going to say we need a producer," she says. "What they don't understand is that we're just four people in a small town who found each other and wanted to write an album. So we did."