The Black Keys Won't Make The Same Record Twice: 'That's Failure'

Dropping the revs back after the runaway success of 2011 album El Camino, The Black Keys have once again shaken the ideals of what a 'garage two-piece' is capable of with their eighth studio offering Turn Blue. A hypnotic body of work – far denser and more lucid than anything the band have created previously – the album sees Carney and long-time running mate Dan Auerbach getting weird and wonderful, with a light psychedelic blanket wrapping up their trademark highway rock'n'roll.

El Camino took the band places they could have only dreamed of when they were slugging it out in the bars of Akron, Ohio, a decade before. They headlined Coachella, filled New York's Madison Square Garden – a sell-out in 15 minutes no less – and the pair once again found themselves on the red carpet at the Grammy Awards, trumping the three gongs they received for 2010's Brothers by taking home four statues, winning Best Rock Album and Producer Of The Year in the process. Hell, Carney even got into a social media spat with Bieber and his Beliebers.

Before those 2013 Grammys the band had been working in a Michigan studio, cutting an entire record in ten days. However, the album the pair were left with sounded like El Camino 2.0. Arguably the songs were solid – great even – but there just wasn't enough creative evolution. Carney remembers, “After all that shit we just realised that we'd been going at it strong since 2009 and that we should take a little breather.” However, he's quick to clarify that the “breather” still only equated to four weeks off, the band touring South and North America while frontman Auerbach's relationship dissolved behind the scenes.

Still, it was enough time for the pair to decide they were going to return to the studio with good friend and long-time collaborator Brian 'Danger Mouse' Burton, ditching the Midwest for the sunny surrounds of Los Angeles, California to cut another record. “We didn't want to push something out as fast as we could,” Carney reasons, “we wanted to take a moment to slow things down.”

Burton – who's currently touring Broken Bells' second record, 2014's After The Disco – has been producing The Black Keys since 2008's Attack & Release, and has long been considered part of the family.

“Since the first day we talked to him on the phone we felt connected to him,” smiles Carney. “We've known him now for like seven years, and we've been working together for seven years so he's one of our best friends really, and he's most likely the only producer we'll ever work with because when we go into the studio it's like a three-man team, he kinda joins the band for the record – he writes with us, then we all produce it. We all have equal say.”

And considering the last two Black Keys' records have come from entering the studio with no material, the results of the working relationship speak for themselves. “We respect his opinion to the point where he's able to get things done that he wants to get done, and same thing goes when he's dealing with us,” says the drummer. “And we always feel pleased with the outcome. A lot of times when you go into the studio with a producer it can be really hard to let go and see where it goes, and Dan and I learned from the first time we worked with him that that's the only way it works, you've got to share in the creativity if you're going to ask for it.

“He's taught me one important lesson: that if you don't try it, you can't dislike it. And that is something that I think everybody needs to learn; it's maybe one of the most important life lessons that I've learned, and Brian taught it to me through a very stern conversation in 2007. I was shooting down some idea and he pulled me outside and basically told me that, and since then I've had to tell the same thing to five or six bands that I've worked with.”

Two-and-a-half songs from the Michigan sessions still ended up getting used on Turn Blue though: the beginning of first single Fever “up until the breakdown at the end”, It's Up To You Now and Gotta Get Away, the “fastest song we'd ever written” according to Carney.

“We weren't going to put [Gotta Get Away] on the record, but we decided that the record was, if you go in on the lyrics, it's pretty heavy and kinda sad and twisted,” he says. “But we wanted to put that song at the end just to lighten the whole experience a little bit. I know Captain Beefheart used tricks like that on [1967 debut] Safe As Milk, where he put this song I'm Glad right in between the two heaviest songs, just to lighten the mood a little bit.

“The thing about those three songs is that they're the three fastest songs on the record,” Carney adds, “and that makes sense because we were coming straight off the El Camino tour and playing all the fast material from that record and thinking in that world, and we switched gears heavily when we went to LA. But those songs were ones we kept going back to and they seemed to make sense in the context of the record.”

What strikes you during your first few spins of Turn Blue is how apt the title is for the entire body of work. These are songs that you can get lost in and be held down by. Straight-up stomping rock moments are sparse, drifting guitar solos are plentiful, and the overall dreaminess of the release once again gives The Black Keys' catalogue a new lean, the record peeling like an onion with every spin. Carney says that his favourite records growing up had that same immersive effect on him.

“Led Zeppelin II is a record like that, that I can get really lost in, because they're almost not songs, they're just riffs and beats and space and vocal parts, and I think the way they utilised the form of a song that always fascinated me. But y'know, there's different records, like Pavement's Slanted And Enchanted – the first time I heard that it was like a fifth generation dubbed cassette, and it had this noise/haze over the whole tape, and it made it feel really mysterious and really detached; it was sloppy, and it was sometimes difficult and sometimes really hooky, at least to me. And I've always been fascinated by that, [being] able to make a record that you kinda want to live inside of.”

The evolution of The Black Keys sound has been gradual yet inevitable, and Carney wants to keep change as a constant in the future. “To expect someone to not grow musically or personally in like a decade is kinda psychotic,” he scoffs. “I wouldn't want to be making those [older] records again, I'd actually feel like we'd be the definition of a failure if over the course of a decade our records sounded exactly the same. Dan and I are huge fans of The Beatles, they're our favourite band, and you go listen to the first record, I Want To Hold Your Hand, and then you hear the B-side of Abbey Road; I mean, you can hear it's the same voices, but everything's changed. That's like the benchmark of success to me, and one day, hopefully, Dan and I can make a record that is somewhere on that scale. We haven't yet, and I don't think we ever will, but just knowing that exists, that you can see this band in eight years go from point A to point Z is a reminder why I want to make music.”

More.