AT THE START of the Black Keys’ latest album, Ohio Players, singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach declares that he’s going to “spend the rest of my days in the middle of nowhere.”
He’s joking, of course.
It’s certainly been an eventful journey for Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney since the pair met as childhood neighbors in Akron, Ohio. Both have musical family backgrounds that stoked their own interests, and diverse ones at that. Auerbach’s cousin Robert Quine was one of New York City’s top guns, playing with Lou Reed, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, Tom Waits, Matthew Sweet and many others. Carney’s uncle Ralph Carney, meanwhile, was a saxophonist who played with Waits, among others. Auerbach and Carney seemed strange bedfellows as teens — the former was a jock, the latter a self-described outsider — but by 1996 they were playing together and recording their experiments on Carney’s portable four-track recorder.
“When we get together now, it’s still the same as it was then, man,” Auerbach notes from within the vintage gear–oriented “embarrassment of riches” he keeps at his Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville. “We don’t even talk about it. We don’t have any preconceived notions of how it’s gonna go. We just start playing and making music and doing what comes naturally, just like we were doing when we were 16.”
It’s fair to say it’s worked out well for the Black Keys. They’ve released a dozen studio albums (including the double-Platinum Brothers in 2010 and El Camino in 2011), a lauded Blakroc collaboration with Damon Dash, 10 Top 20 singles on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, and five Grammy Awards from 16 nominations.
Even more impressive has been the duo’s sonic evolution. The raw guitar-and-drums grit of 2002’s has developed into more sophisticated and expansive soundscapes over the years, with the likes of Danger Mouse helping to stretch how Auerbach and Carney view the Black — but the Keys’ unapologetic sense of curiosity and adventurous ambitions have goosed Auerbach and Carney into realms beyond.
