The Black Keys’ Patrick Carney is having the most fun these days

The Black Keys. // photo credit Jim Herrington

Over the course of their career, rockers The Black Keys have gone from a scrappy duo playing the Replay Lounge to headlining amphitheaters and music festivals the world over. It’s due in no small part to the incredibly catchy songs  which manage to find the sweet spot between blues, punk, rock ‘n’ roll, and a touch of funk. Whether it’s the slinky “I’ll Be Your Man” from their debut, The Big Come Up, or the omnipresent El Camino single “Gold on the Ceiling,” The Black Keys’ songs know how to make you move.

The duo of frontman and guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney are currently on tour in support of 2022’s Dropout Boogie, with another album soon to be on the way. We hopped on the phone with drummer Carney to discuss the band’s career ahead of their show this Friday, August 25, at Starlight.

The Pitch: This is a weird question to start out with, but watching you drum and listening to you drum are two very different experiences. I’m very curious as to how you developed your technique.

Well, technique or lack thereof, you know, is what produces that special self-taught drummer thing. I guess the short answer is that I got into electric guitar, and then I bought a drum set when I was 15 for like 200 bucks just so I could have it at my dad’s house so that I could start a band. It wasn’t really for me to play. I had it at my house and would have my friends come over, and we would jam.

That was kind of the idea—to have just everything ready to go because we’d have to rely on our parents driving us and our equipment around and everyone. It would be such a hassle, so I bought a bass and a drum set and whatever else—four-track. And yeah, I never really played it. And then Dan would come over, and that’s the one time I would play drums.

I was jamming the drums, goofing around, but I really didn’t start playing drums until I was like 21, and it was basically because I was gonna record Dan’s bar band, and the other dudes didn’t show up. We sat around waiting for them, and then Dan’s like, “You should just play drums on these songs,” which I’d never heard, and I didn’t know how to play drums, really. I think he really got a kick out of how ass backwards I played the drums. Then we sent that jam off, and we got a record deal, and then I became a drummer.

That works well with you all being from Akron and bands forming out of the idea of like, “Listen, I have this idea in my head. I need to get it out there. I don’t know if I can do it, but I’m the person who can.”

Well, yeah, I mean, it’s kind of a Midwestern thing, right? I just remember my dad played me Led Zeppelin II, and I heard Sex Pistols and the Clash, and then Nirvana came out right when I was 11 or something. I just got hit with music really hard, and I just wanted to be part of it some way. I begged my dad for an electric guitar, and my buddies and I would all just jam and stuff. I feel like I ended up with this appreciation of music, and it was never about getting good at playing it. It was about making something interesting, you know?

I never focused on the technical aspect of anything other than maybe recording, but it wasn’t about that. It was about making something that felt cool, so part of that was just making it yourself. I had a four-track since I was 12 or 13, so it wasn’t about being the best at something. It was about making something that your friends wanted to listen to.

On your most recent album, Dropout Boogie, you get to work with some friends. You’ve got three songs with Greg Cartwright from everything garage rock. You worked with Billy Gibbons. It’s obvious why you’d wanna work with Greg Cartwright and Billy Gibbons and be able to have them write stuff and perform on your album, but what made you bring other folks in?

Dan and I both just love to make records, whether it’s producing other bands or making our own records, and I think the dynamic of a band can get really insular. Luckily, Dan and I got to experience true collaboration with Danger Mouse a lot, and then we went through this period of working with him a lot, and then we took a break not working on Black Keys stuff for a few years, and we made this record, Let’s Rock, reacquainting with each other and through that process we became tighter than we’ve ever been.

While that happened, we were like, “Wouldn’t it be fun to make some songs with some other people—and not only fun, but wouldn’t it be easier? Could it be better and easier and more fun?” And the answer was yes, so we called Greg and got to hang with him and made some tunes with him, and then, one day, Billy Gibbons was in Nashville. Dan had gotten word of it, so he asked Billy to stop by. We just jammed with him for an hour and made a song, and that’s what we’ve been doing lately, which is, we finished Dropout Boogie, and we just never left the studio.

We just essentially sent it off for mastering, and we’re back in the studio writing ideas, and just for a few months of that, we were like, “If we’re gonna collaborate with Greg and all these friends that we have, we should also branch out and go deeper into the Rolodex a little bit,” and the first person we thought of was Beck because we’ve known him for—I guess I actually met him when I was 16, but he gave us our first big break, really. Well, Sleater-Kinney did, but he was on the next big tour we had 20 years ago, and we’ve been huge fans of his, so we called him up and asked him if he wanted to come hang in Nashville, make some tunes, and he did.

We had this really fruitful, fun session over a couple of days. That’s just kind of been what our M.O. has been. We’ve been finishing this record, but we’ve just been doing lots of collaborations. Usually, Dan and I will do the music and then put together the rest of the song with another artist, although we worked with Noel Gallagher, and we went into the studio in London with no material and sat down in the room and wrote three songs in three days from scratch with Noel. We do it, I guess, in a different way, but it’s been fun, and it keeps us on our toes.

The cool thing is making music with all these different people but then trying to pull the thread through each song so they sound like a collection that makes sense together.

Noel Gallagher and Beck are both very talented musicians, but I was trying to figure out how you make all those songs work on one record without sounding disparate.

Yeah. I mean, that’s been the challenge, but it’s easier than it sounds. Beck and Noel are both such melodic people that, when you hear the songs that we’ve made with those guys, you can definitely tell how that fits into this. We’re pulling it in an interesting direction. We ended up making, like, 45 songs to get to an album because we had to make it make sense, but it’s been the most fun I’ve ever had making a record, that’s for sure.

The Black Keys play Starlight on Friday, August 25—details on that show here.