When you’re a two-piece band, it’s all the more vital to challenge yourself with each and every album. That explains The Black Keys: the Ohio duo began as a crunchy blues-rock outfit but are now just as likely to hijack soul or gospel. And while still a two-piece, they’ve added extra instruments to their guitar-drums core ever since 2007’s Attack & Release, their first time employing an outside producer. Said producer is none other than Danger Mouse, who also lent a brief hand on last year’s triple-Grammy-winning album Brothers. And now he has not just co-produced but co-wrote the band’s new seventh album, El Camino.

El Camino is at once streamlined and varied, adopting T. Rex swagger on the lead single and album opener ‘Lonely Boy’ but then splintering all over from there. The head-turning ‘Little Black Submarines’ is folk balladry turned Sabbath-y outbreak, while ‘Stop Stop’ could almost pass for a Gnarls Barkley tune. The familiar hooks and thump are certainly there, but they’re just the beginning.

Outside activities have also kept things fresh for singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney. Auerbach released the great solo outing Keep It Hid in 2009 and produced the debut album by his protégé Jessica Lea Mayfield. Carney, meanwhile, has run the Ohio indie label Audio Eagle and dabbled in the sideband Drummer. The Black Keys also backed a slew of hip-hop artists for the 2009 album Blackroc. As it turns out, though, a lot of those extra-circular projects are already done and dusted. Below, Carney weighs in on them, along with reteaming with Danger Mouse and salvaging a video directed by Bob Dylan’s son.

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Where did the album title come from? That isn’t an El Camino on the cover.

Honestly, we just thought El Camino sounded cool. And the United States and Australia are the only places those cars exist, I guess. Everyone in America that hears “El Camino” thinks of that car, [so] we thought it’d be funny to put a picture of a minivan on the cover.

How did you get Bob Odenkirk to star in that video teaser? I’m a big fan of his from Mr. Show.



Dan and I are big Mr. Show fans too. We grew up in high school watching that show. We actually had David Cross direct one of our first videos. When it came time to do stuff for this record, the people at Warner Brothers were asking about who would be interested in writing some funny little trailers for the record. His name came up and we just went with him because we’re such big fans.

Was he familiar with the band already?

Yeah. I met Bob briefly in 2003: we were opening for Sleater-Kinney in L.A. and he was at the show. Those [Mr. Show] guys are all indie rock fans. And Bob is really, really fucking funny.

What inspired the ‘Lonely Boy’ video, with that guy dancing and singing?



It was just an accident. Seriously: we hired Jesse Dylan, Bob Dylan’s son, to direct a video for us. He pitched a couple scripts and we went with one of them. The script involved Bob Odenkirk as the used car salesman and Dan and I seeing an ad for his car dealership on TV and going and buying this car. But in the process, we were coming across all these people that would start dancing and lip-syncing the song. We got a final cut of the video and hated it. We just couldn’t stand it.

It sounds a bit kitschy.

Yeah, it was just really stupid. But we watched that guy: that guy was just an extra that they hired from a casting place. Basically, 10 minutes before they shot that, they played him the song and told him to memorise the lyrics, if he could, and to dance and sing it. So he came up with all that shit on his own. That was the only good part of the entire video, so we told [Dylan] to do a cut of just that. So it was just a complete fucking accident.

It’s pretty mesmerising. The fact that it’s just that, holds your attention more than the typical video.

We were only supposed to be using two to three seconds of that entire thing. And the guy that shot [that part of] the video did a really poor job, like moving the camera all over the place.

Well, it gives it that found-footage feel…

Yeah. It’s because no one really cared about what it looked like. And that’s what made it good.

I want to talk to you about working with Danger Mouse again. He seems to have this knack for softening the grit that you guys naturally have. Not in a way that diminishes it, but he seems to deepen and widen your sound…

Well, he’s the only person we’ve ever worked with outside the band. Dan and I made a decision in 2007 to make a record [Attack & Release] with bass guitar on every song, and keyboards, organs, synthesisers. We wanted to make a record with all those instruments and just treat the band like a four-piece, even though there’s only two people. Just because we thought it’d be more fun in the studio. Dan and I decided to also work with a producer [for the first time].

I don’t know how much Brian [Burton, aka Danger Mouse] deepens the sound or softens it any more so than what Dan and I would do naturally. ‘Cause I think Brothers is pretty much the softest Black Keys record, and he worked on one song. The attraction to working with Brian is that we all have similar taste and all respect each other’s opinion. So it’s easier for us, as a two-piece band, to go into a studio and work with a tiebreaker type of person. And Brian plays that role.

But on this album, he also co-wrote it with us, which was fun. I think every time we go into the studio, we like to do something slightly different, which is what ultimately led us to wanting to work with Brian in the first place and make our records a little bit more fleshed out. This is just a continuation of that.

Is there a second Blackroc record planned at some point?

No. There’s like nine songs that were never released that are pretty much done. But we never really had a plan to release those.

Were those from the same sessions as the album?

No, they’re from a session we did like two weeks afterwards. We have a lot of hip-hop stuff that we did with other people that is just never gonna come out. Like, we did basically a full record with RZA in Los Angeles. Then we have these nine songs from this second Blackroc session. But y’know, a lot of it’s just experimenting. Some of it’s really good, I think, and some of it is not so good. But I think there’s just too much of a novelty factor to keep doing it over and over again. Doing it once was enough. I think it might get old if we keep revisiting it. But maybe one day that stuff will see the light of day. I don’t know.

I was also wondering about Drummer. I really liked the first record [2009’s Feel Good Together]: is there another one planned?

No, there isn’t. We haven’t even played a note together since I guess October 2009. But I think I’m gonna remix the album. Because I didn’t mix that or record it. I had my friend do it, and I kind of regret not mixing it.

What don’t you like about the mix?

It’s a little bit mucky in the low mids, and I think the drums could sound better. There could be a little more definition in the low mid frequencies. Just nit-picking stuff. I’d like to remix it and press it up on vinyl, so I can feel good about it existing still.

Are you still doing the label Audio Eagle?

No, not really. It was kind of just an experiment to see if I could start a label with my friends and release music with my friends and make something that could support itself. But after doing seven or eight albums, it just wasn’t working. I learned a lot from doing it, though: about putting out records and also about working with your friends. How that can be really beneficial and how it can be really fucking bad.

Was it interesting to see the music industry at the other end of the assembly line?

Yeah. Black Keys was like the fourth band I was ever in, and everything else was just for kicks. When Dan and I started this band, we really tried to tour and get our shit together and make a record. We were just fucking working our asses off on it. We lucked the fuck out and were able to tap into something at the right time and the right place, where we were able to have a career. And seeing a lot of bands I’ve helped put out records through Audio Eagle have a really different experience was really fucking heartbreaking, honestly.

Do you know when you’re coming to Australia again?

Not really … Ballpark would be [Spring] of 2012.

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Doug Wallen