Feels Like Home

The Black Keys’ new album Let’s Rock is unashamedly an electric guitar record. From the first seconds of opener Shine A Little Light it’s a reckless, crunching rock ’n’ roll album, full of unhinged leads, strange textures and rattling, heavy riffs. It also represents a trip home for Dan Auerbach. The Black Keys’ guitarist is now a Nashville resident but the album buzzes with the “weird”, wild Northeastern Ohio rock music and raw electric blues that obsessed him throughout his teens in Akron – the music that motivated him to stray far enough from his family’s bluegrass jams to pick up the electric. It is the sound that nourished his addictively wild, off-the-cuff playing style. The sound that, a few short years later – combined with the shuffling, equally idiosyncratic drumming of his co-conspirator Pat Carney – would take the duo from Ohio Nowhere Boys to the biggest rock group to form since the turn of the millennium.

Your musical roots were initially in bluegrass and playing with your family. How did your relationship with the electric guitar begin?

“I think my relationship with the electric guitar was formed early on, just being], before Joe Walsh. He played in Cleveland every Thursday and I used to go see him. I saw Link Wray in Cleveland, too. I just had these influences around me, all the time.”