09/05 @ Tanglewood, Lenox MA

“In a musical landscape that often seems increasingly interested in technical perfection, pitch correction and smoothing out every rough edge, watching Howard sing live is a reminder of how powerful it can be when the rough edges stay exactly where they are supposed to be.”

I spent the first part of my evening at Tanglewood doing basically everything except finding where I was supposed to be.

It was my first time there, and I wanted to look around. I wandered through the grounds past families spread across blankets with coolers and picnic baskets, groups of friends catching up, people pouring drinks and passing food around while the sounds of a few thousand separate conversations seemed to settle over the lawn.

Eventually, I found myself at a clearing and looked to my left.

The sun was slowly sinking behind the mountains, the air had cooled just enough to notice, and everything happening all around me had blurred into this really beautiful kind of white noise. For a few minutes, I just stood there and watched.

It struck me then that the night had already started, even though nobody had played a note yet. There was this sense of community in the air that felt unusually tangible, like everyone had come to Tanglewood for the music but had also come to be around one another.

A few hours later, after Mavis Staples and Alabama Shakes had carried that same crowd through gospel, soul, blues, rock, tension, longing and so much more, I would find myself thinking about that clearing again.

Mavis Staples took the stage first and, I mean… Talk about a masterclass in taking us to church.

There are very few voices that carry the kind of weight hers does. You can hear decades of soul, gospel, history, humor and conviction sitting inside it, and at 87, she sings with a force that makes it feel like every word means something to her before it ever reaches us.

That conviction came through especially clearly when she addressed the audience.

“We don’t need no dictators, we don’t need no agents from ICE, we don’t need no men telling us women what to do!” she told the crowd. “We’ve got work to do! But we’ll do it together!”

Soon after came a singalong of “Everybody Needs Love,” and there was something really beautiful about hearing the crowd join her after everything she had just said. The people who had already felt like a community on the lawn before the show suddenly sounded like one too.

Then Alabama Shakes came out, and the entire feeling of the night shifted.

From the moment Brittany Howard stepped onto the stage, she made it abundantly clear what it means to be an all-around performer. There are so many words that come to mind when trying to describe her — rockstar, soulful, commanding, powerful, captivating — and somehow all of them still feel a little incomplete once you actually watch her perform.

What makes Howard so magnetic goes beyond the fact that she is an incredible singer. There is a way she seems to enter the music completely, and instead of disappearing somewhere the audience cannot follow, she somehow brings everyone with her. The entire performance felt like being wrapped up in something warm and pulled into this world of musicianship, texture, color and feeling, with Howard guiding the way while still feeling like she was experiencing it alongside us.

Her voice can move from the softest whisper into a huge, full-bodied belt within seconds, and the shift always feels connected to the emotion of the song. Every rasp, crack, and growl becomes part of the story she is telling.

In a musical landscape that often seems increasingly interested in technical perfection, pitch correction and smoothing out every rough edge, watching Howard sing live is a reminder of how powerful it can be when the rough edges stay exactly where they are supposed to be. You hear what she is feeling in real time, and that makes it very easy to start feeling it too.

The same thing is true of Alabama Shakes as a band. Their music carries pieces of soul, blues, gospel, rock and country, but none of those labels are enough on their own to explain what they do. The band takes all of those sounds and pulls them into something that feels completely their own.

That push and pull is probably what made me fall in love with them in the first place, through their album Sound & Color. It has remained one of my favorite albums because the music constantly seems to exist between worlds. There is something dreamy and weightless about it while also feeling intensely physical, and there are moments where it feels like you are floating somewhere far away before the rhythm or the groove suddenly reminds you that your feet are still planted firmly on the ground.

“Gimme All Your Love” captures that feeling perfectly.

Howard sings the song like she is crying out for somebody, pleading with them almost, while the band locks into a groove that is sexy, flirtatious, needy and incredibly controlled. It’s yearning that you can move to.

For those few minutes, it felt like floating through a world lined with velvet while still being held to the ground, swaying gently like a leaf in a cool summer night’s breeze. There is something about that contradiction that has always defined Alabama Shakes for me, and hearing it happen live made the song feel even bigger.

“Don’t Wanna Fight” was another standout because of the way Howard uses her voice as an instrument all its own. She bends into her rasp, stretches certain notes, pulls back from others and somehow makes even the simplest phrase sound urgent. There were several moments where I caught myself just standing there, completely locked in, because it is difficult to watch somebody use their voice that freely and not be a little stunned by it.
Then came “Sound & Color,” and the atmosphere opened up in a completely different way. The title track off their sophomore album brought a beautiful softness into the show, almost like everything around us had suddenly widened and slowed down. The arrangement gave every sound more space to breathe, which felt especially fitting for a song that has always seemed more interested in capturing a feeling than explaining one.
There is loneliness in it, and isolation, and this craving for connection that sits alongside a strange kind of optimism about whatever comes next. There is also a little mourning for whatever came before, for a past that still feels close enough to remember but too far away to return to. It lives somewhere in that strange limbo between past and future, and under the open Tanglewood sky, in that cool September air, that feeling became even larger.
“Garden” brought that sense of openness somewhere much more intimate. The song is deceptively calm, but underneath that calm is so much longing. There is this need for another person, this desire to give them what they deserve, and Howard leaned all the way into that feeling. She sang much of the song with her eyes closed, and there were moments where it almost seemed like she had forgotten there were thousands of people watching her.

That was something I kept noticing throughout the entire set.

Howard seems to be transported when she sings, and watching that happen is part of what makes her such a captivating performer. Dressed in a beautiful baby blue frilled outfit covered in small stones that caught the lights every time she moved, she would close her eyes, tilt her head back, grip her guitar and completely disappear into whatever song she was singing.

Somehow, though, she never leaves the audience behind.

The backing vocalists, Karita Law, Shanay Johnson and Lloyd Buchanan, were such an important part of that world too. Their voices blended beautifully with Howard’s and with one another’s, and each of them had moments to shine throughout the set. They moved between tambourines, drum sticks, claps and bits of choreography, and the chemistry between the three of them was impossible to miss.

They looked like they were having a genuinely great time, and that energy carried into the audience. There is something infectious about watching people who are exceptional at what they do still seem completely thrilled to be doing it.

My favorite performance of the night came with “Tied to You.” By that point, the show already felt like it had carried us far away from where we began, and this was the moment where that journey became the most vivid for me.

The song itself feels like a slow spiral downward, almost like falling through a well lined with the finest satin while everything around you glows in deep reds, purples, blues and pinks. The fall feels like it is happening in real time and slow motion at once, and the band lets you stay inside that feeling long enough for it to become almost physical.

When Howard sings “I’m tied to your horse,” the song opens into an entirely different space. The lighting shifted into cooler tones, and the band began playing around with this tension between major and minor, comfort and unease.

Howard and Johnson found an incredible pocket together in their call-and-response vocals, and the effect was almost impossible to describe without flattening it. There were tiny flashes of dissonance where the song seemed like it could pull apart, and then everything would resolve beautifully for just long enough before slipping back toward uncertainty again.

By then, the entire night had started to feel like one long journey through sound and color, pun fully intended. Howard and the band had taken us somewhere soulful and dreamy and strange, somewhere filled with longing, warmth, tension and release, and “Tied to You” became the point where that journey started bringing us back down.

The descent itself became the way back to Earth.

By the end of the show, the grass was still underneath us, the mountains were still surrounding us, and the night air had completely taken over where the sunset had been just a few hours earlier, but everything felt slightly altered after everything we had just moved through together.

None of what Alabama Shakes does would be possible without the musicians standing alongside Howard. Guitarist Heath Fogg, keyboardists Ben Tanner and Paul Horton, bassist Zac Cockrell and drummer Noah Bond played with a level of connection that this catalog demands. There are songs where everybody seems to be playing an independent part that should not logically fit with anything else happening around it, yet somehow it all locks together. There are other moments where the timing gets so loose and free that the slightest disconnect could make the entire thing fall apart, yet the connection never slipped.

Every musician seemed completely aware of what the others were doing, leaving enough space for each person to shine while still moving together as one unit. The pieces fit into each other in a way that made even the most complicated arrangements feel natural.

By the time the set ended, Tanglewood looked different in the most literal sense. The sunset I had stopped to watch hours earlier was long gone, the lawn had gone dark, and people were starting to gather blankets and coolers while conversations picked back up around me, carrying murmurs of “That was incredible,” and “What an unbelievable show.”

After spending so much of the night inside Howard’s world of color, texture, longing and movement, there was something grounding about suddenly noticing all of those ordinary details again. That is what stayed with me most. Mavis Staples began the evening by making a crowd of strangers feel like a community, and Alabama Shakes took that same crowd somewhere much more inward and strange, allowing us to float around there for a while before eventually setting us back down where we started.

I’ve always approached concerts and shows as an escape to another world for a few hours. This show shifted that perspective, because it showed me how powerful it can be to escape inward instead. To not go to a world that’s not our own, but to find the world that lives inside us all.