Gemini

This was the first track that Alabama Shakes recorded for Sound & Color. Vocalist Brittany Howard told the story of this song to Uncut: "The story here is that I'd set my studio up in the kitchen, because it's too cold in the basement," she said. "I'd been fooling around on my computer, trying to find something that I can dig into. I've got this little MIDI keyboard, I can't stop playing with it." "Anyway, I started writing music," Howard continued. "Then I went and got a short story I had written and I tried to fit as many words in there as I could. I took the demo when we went to the studio, showed it to the guys. They thought it was really cool, so ' Gemini' was the first song we cut in the studio for this record."

Late '60s and early '70s Temptations was the touchstone for this psychedelic space jam. "With 'Gemini,' I thought about how the Temptations used to write pop songs, but then got really far out on 'Cloud Nine' or 'Psychedelic Shack,'" Howard explained. "I imagined myself in the situation of the African-American groups in the '70s, when synthesizers had just come out and they were making all of this moody stuff."