Alabama’s Alamantra’s Bobby Shiflett

Bobby Shiflett is the singer, songwriter, and guitarist for Birmingham’s band Alamantra. He’s a Birmingham native who possesses years of experience in music, partly because he grew up in a talented musical family.

“Even from the time I was a toddler, some of my earliest memories are of banging on my mom’s piano at my grandparent’s house,” Bobby explains. “My mom plays piano and organ. My dad went to school on a voice scholarship and used to play violin. He likes to flirt at playing dulcimer, too. He likes to sing gospel music and was friends with one of Elvis’s backup singers. His mother, my Mimi, used to put on a Minnie Pearl hat and play the ukulele. She was a hoot!”

Bobby’s parents nurtured his innate love of music by providing him with a creative musical education.

“My mom encouraged me to take piano lessons when I was about eight. It didn’t really catch on with me,” he says dismissively. “I couldn’t get a groove on playing ‘Hot Cross Buns’ and ‘Long, Long Ago.’”

Fortunately, Bobby continued playing music and eventually found his muse.

“When I was in fifth grade I played trombone in the school band, but I really didn’t take to that either,” he recalls. “I was pretty much musically inert until I was 12. That was when I discovered that band who had been the soundtrack to my whole life: The Beatles. I play music because of The Beatles.”

After discovering the Fab Four, Bobby’s passion for music grew to the point that he became a musical autodidact.

“I had already taken to writing lyrical poetry, and that summer, I started teaching myself how to play guitar on an old Stella Harmony. My mom had all of these songbooks from Readers Digest and Top of the Pops kind of stuff. The first two songs I learned how to play on the guitar were ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ and ‘Blowing In the Wind.’”

This new world of music opened up a world of opportunity, and Bobby auditioned for and was accepted into the Alabama School of Fine Arts for his senior year of high school.

“That short period of time is really about the only formal training I’ve had,” he admits. “The rest is home-made. I’ve mainly learned from the other musicians I’ve played with…and thousands of hours of practice.”

Bobby loves and listens to a variety of different musicians, but says that the key influencers of Alamantra’s current rock/blues style are Pink Floyd, Blue Oyster Cult, Dick Dale, and JJ Cale. Some of his favorite local acts are Dub Massive, Royal and Toulouse, Happy Lemmy, Ogredrive, Good Morning Lucy, Voices in the Trees, Soul Enigma, Sharrif Simmons, and Big Tasty.

“Birmingham is an incredible garden of music,” Bobby asserts.

Alamantra consists of several other musicians from the Birmingham area, with Brandon Allison on drums, Steve Casteel on guitar, and Rick Glaze on bass and vocals. They often collaborate with other musicians and friends in their regular playing sessions.

“A good session is when I get to sit and watch people who are very comfortable with their talent and skills, do what they do,” Bobby says passionately. “It’s great to watch how a song not only unfolds, but becomes transformed in the exchange of ideas, especially when one has a producer as good as Brad Timko has been on [Alamantra’s latest] ‘Workingman’s Bread’ project. As great as his ears are, his patience is astounding. We had a number of local Birmingham musicians come in and do various things, and they were all incredible, just knew what to do, and became creative with it. Those were very fun, productive sessions.”

Alamantra recently self-released their latest album, “Workingman’s Bread.” Creating their own album on their own terms is very important to their creative vision.

“I like the freedom of doing things exactly the way I want to do them, when I want to do them, and with the people I want to do them with,” Bobby explains. “I’m not interested in giving that away to be some corporate label’s tax write-off. I still see/hear music as something more than just a commodity – it’s a communion. I think we can attain our goals as writers and musicians without having to be co-opted by the industry. This freedom also allows us to explore new approaches to packaging, becoming carbon footprint neutral, for instance.”

Alamantra’s songs address topics that range from politics and current events, to food and wine, to love and sex. Bobby describes their music’s central axis as conveying “bohemianism,” and his lyrics contribute to this vibe.

“I’ve written hundreds that range from neo-classical guitar exercises to folk to hard rock, et cetera,” Bobby says. “The process varies. Sometimes I hear the song complete with words, et cetera, like ‘Ajarah Jam.’ Sometimes I get a chord progression and melody and the words take forever, [like] ‘Move On.’ Sometimes I get the words first and have to build the music [as in the song] ‘Brian Jones.’”

He goes on to explain that their music is “multi-faceted but not complex. Though it doesn’t have much in common with what is described as Musical Impressionism, these songs do have some of the qualities ascribed to the visual Post-Impressionists like Les Nabis: organic composition, emphasis on the way light and darkness interchange and refocus attention, ordinary subject matter; variety of media, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. Music is the end product and the audible expression of a musician’s synthesis of nature in personal aesthetic metaphors and symbols.”

Alamantra fans will find their performances to be innovative, and you can hear the passion and energy in each chord.

“I believe in Hunter Thompson’s maxim: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” Bobby reveals. “If it is an unplanned note, it can turn into a whole new jam. Very rarely do Steve or I know exactly what we’re going to play anyway. We’ve pretty much stopped using set lists. Each person in the band just tries to listen to what is happening, and we let the music guide us…or not. If it is a string, or drum stick or drum head breaking, we work around it. If it’s four strings breaking, I’d cue Steve to cover, drop my volume and get through the song.”

Alamantra fans can find their music on iTunes or Rhapsody, and can also hear them playing around Birmingham fairly regularly.

“Our fan is someone appreciate things like melody, harmony, texture, and context,” Bobby says. “They like variety. They want to feel music at the emotional level without being cerebrally abused by it. They want music that is structured without a song losing its organic integrity.”

When asked how he would define his personal musical success, Bobby shared a content, zen point of view.

“Another day above the ground,” he says. “Being happy with your life and what you’re doing with it. Or as the SubGenius like to say, ‘Slack.’ For me, it’s not chasing green pieces of paper. I only do that because we all have to. I don’t find it inspirational.”

Find Alamantra on their website, Reverbnation, and Facebook.

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