While Alabama Shakes frontwoman Brittany Howard has been inspired by artists from Prince and Jimi Hendrix to the Supremes and Led Zeppelin, her greatest muse has been her late sister, Jaime.
“She just taught me how to have fun using my imagination,” says Howard of her older sibling, who taught her to play piano and write poetry. “Basically, when I showed up in the world, my family was having a hard time financially, and she was just like, ‘Oh, it’s OK. I’ll show you how to have fun.’ And we would just play. She taught me how to be creative.”
With her debut solo album, “Jaime,” out Friday, Howard pays titular tribute to her sister, who died from retinoblastoma, a rare form of eye cancer, when she was just 13. Howard — who will also rock her new tunes at the Beacon Theatre on Tuesday — was only 9 when she lost Jaime.
“When she passed away, it just tore everything apart,” says Howard, who had a similar condition that caused partial blindness in her left eye. “It was the single most devastating thing that’s ever happened in our family, [with] everybody trying to learn how to grieve on their own … What I did was I went in my room and learned how to play guitar, taught myself how to play instruments, found my way out that way.”
Howard’s first guitar was a special gift left behind by Jaime. “It was my sister’s guitar — I don’t know where she got it from,” says Howard, who grew up in a junkyard in Athens, Ala. “It was like this J.C. Penney guitar, and I dug it out of the closet one day. As soon as I picked up the guitar, I started immediately writing songs. I was more interested in making something than playing somebody else’s songs.”
Howard has been writing songs and making music ever since. After she left her job as a mail carrier for the US Postal Service, Alabama Shakes released its debut album, “Boys & Girls,” in 2012. The blues-rock band followed that up with 2015’s Grammy-winning “Sound & Color.” But the group’s lead singer and guitarist wanted to shake things up and make a solo LP.
“It kinda had to do more with just a life move,” says Howard, 30, who also has two side bands, Thunderbitch and Bermuda Triangle. “But we sat down, we talked about it, and everybody was really gracious and kind and cool.”
The journey to “Jaime” began with a long road trip. “Basically, I learned a lot about myself from driving across the country, just by interacting with people that are really different from me and being in towns that are so different from where I came from,” says Howard. “During that long drive, you have a lot of time to think and reflect and go inward.”
That helped Howard to get more personal in her solo songs than she ever would have in Alabama Shakes. And it allowed her to stretch out musically on the eclectic “Jaime.” “I was just really making music that I wanted to listen to,” she says. “The record’s not all the same thing over and over again. I think that has a lot to do with my musical taste in general. I like so much stuff, there’s no reason to stick to one thing.”
On the sweetly soulful “Georgia,” Howard — who got married to her Bermuda Triangle bandmate Jesse Lasfer last year — delivers a love song to another woman. “When I was growing up, I was just like, ‘Is there anybody like me out there?’ ” she says. “I wasn’t seeing any images being displayed that looked like me, and I wasn’t really hearing a lot of songs that [captured] how I felt … You don’t want to be different. Here you are, always the odd man out.”
Meanwhile, the psychedelic-tinged “Goat Head” addresses a racist incident when a goat head was left in the back seat of the family car. “That’s the only song on the record that made me feel really vulnerable,” says Howard, whose father is black and mother is white. “It’s my parents’ story, but it’s also something in our family we never talk about. I think it’s important to talk about it.”
And it’s also important for Howard to keep Jaime’s name alive: “I wanna celebrate her name, just be like, ‘Yeah, you helped me do this! Here I am — I’m making my own record, doing it my way.’ ”