, a Houston-based seven-piece soul group, she’s shared the stage with Chaka Khan, toured with My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, and received advice from Mavis Staples. But when she’s spoken up about the inequalities of the music business, it hasn’t gone over well.
“Now [I’m] an activist,” she says, with a touch of bemusement. “I didn’t want to be a fucking activist. I want to be a singer.”— their third full-length that’s out now — Franklin and her bandmates channel their own travails in the industry into a how-to guide for other artists, complete with an elaborately colored 12-step pictorial on the inner sleeve. “I wanted to make sure that there’s a piece of art out there encouraging you to go to that next level,” she says.
Reared in a large extended family — her mother is one of eight children, her father one of six — Franklin was surrounded by strong, Black women and began singing in an adult gospel choir at the age of 5. “Every Sunday, I’d lose my voice trying to compete with these ladies,” she recalls with a laugh. That voice, she says, was “a tool to take me wherever it was that I wanted to go.