You could instantly hear the results of these new methods across El Camino. And usually, we went with the faster option. As Auerbach put it in that same American Songwriter interview:įor the first time, we were getting into the nuances of each song by asking ourselves, “How long should this intro be? How long should the pre-chorus be? Should there even be a pre-chorus?” We were playing with tempos and BPMs, seeing how a vocal hook does or doesn’t work at a faster speed. This dovetailed with a more acute attention to songcraft, the three of them working over songs to hone them into the most no-nonsense, direct-endorphin-hit shape. They found themselves writing faster songs - a reflection of their harried headspace but also, presumably, the knowledge that they now had to come armed with bangers for fields full of people. Once in the studio, Auerbach and Carney worked with Danger Mouse on song ideas, getting a track every day or two, then refining. “It was like, ‘Uh, fuck.’ That’s why we didn’t want to take our usual gap between making records… It wasn’t enough time to even consider what was going on.” “It was cool, but it kinda made me nervous,” he said. Speaking to American Songwriter in 2011, Carney relayed how the Brothers era escalated rapidly - getting booked for Saturday Night Live, Grammy noms, the album going gold. The abrupt re-entry was partially by design, a reaction to the whirlwind of Brothers. They entered the studio without any songs, and invited Danger Mouse in not just as a producer, but a co-writer. Relative to their other albums, the Black Keys changed up their approach to make El Camino. It ended up capitalizing on Brothers‘ success in a whole different way. The result, El Camino, arrived a mere year and a half after Brothers. They cancelled some shows, and instead decided to go back into the studio to make another album with Danger Mouse. In most timelines, the band would’ve then toured that into the ground for several years, steadily climbing festival posters, fueled by the resilience of newly infectious tracks like “Tighten Up” and “Howlin’ For You.” Instead, Auerbach and Carney found themselves surprised and burnt out by the sudden embrace of the band - and all the demands that came with it - after all those years with a more underground pedigree. It was a reboot and a culmination and a career milestone, a swampy album with hooks sticky enough that the Black Keys won over a whole lot of of new listeners and started to garner industry stamps of approvals like Grammys. Then, in 2010 - amidst Auerbach supposedly sneak-attacking Carney with a solo album, Carney’s divorce, and the theoretical near-demise of the band - they returned with Brothers, a collection that made good on their early albums while diversifying their sound with psychedelia, soul, and more straight-up classic rock. Most of their albums kept it simple, and it was only when they teamed up with the then in-demand producer Danger Mouse for 2008’s Attack & Release that their palette began to ever so slightly expand. Since their 2002 debut, the Black Keys had mostly favored a solid but unchanging formula, a garage-y blues-indie, driven by Dan Auerbach’s sludgy riffs and Patrick Carney’s bashed-out beats. Then, the Black Keys were really everywhere.Īfter the success of Brothers, the Black Keys could have capitalized. And that was before El Camino arrived, 10 years ago on Monday. By the beginning of the ’10s, though, songs like “Tighten Up” were inescapable in commercials and at college parties alike. There was something cultish about them, especially if you didn’t know about the music criticism narrative that imagined a sort of cartoonish rivalry between the two color-coded garage-rock duos of the ’00s. In my mid-’00s early teenage years, I had a totally different perception of this band: the scuzzy blues-rock dudes adored by the upperclassmen art kids who parked their beat-up cars at the edge of campus to surreptitiously smoke cigarettes. Never strangers to syncing their music, the duo had recently achieved a new level of exposure with a few key singles from 2010’s Brothers, the album that would stand as their mainstream breakthrough after years of consistent critical praise and churning out albums while slugging it out on the road. In fairness, the process had actually been unfolding for years. Suddenly, the Black Keys were everywhere.
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