The story of The Black Keys

Two kids from Akron

The Black Keys story begins in Akron, Ohio, the old rubber capital of America. Dan Auerbach was born on the fourteenth of May 1979, and Patrick Carney on the fifteenth of April 1980. They first crossed paths at about eight or nine, after Pat's parents divorced and his father moved into Dan's neighborhood, just a few houses away. They were not really friends. At Firestone High School they ran in completely different circles. Dan had long hair, captained the soccer team and was, as Pat's brother put it, high school cool. Pat was a gangly outsider with huge glasses and a shaved head, and he was picked on. One acquaintance of Dan's punched him in the face two days in a row, and Pat's mother pressed charges.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Music ran deep in the Auerbach family. Dan's father Chuck was an antiques and folk art dealer with a huge beard, and he raised his son on Robert Johnson, Son House, Hank Williams and Billie Holiday, and took him to see the Grateful Dead. Dan's mother Mary, a French teacher, came from a family that sang bluegrass and old spirituals in harmony at every reunion. Dan's first concert was Whitney Houston, with his mom. His roots also carried real tragedy. His grandmother escaped Europe just before the borders closed, but her entire family was murdered in the Holocaust. Dan said those stories shaped him and made him work harder. The late New York guitarist Robert Quine was a distant cousin.[1] [2] [3]

On the Carney side, Pat's father Jim was a reporter at the Akron Beacon Journal who played him Beatles and Rolling Stones records. His uncle Ralph Carney played saxophone for Tom Waits for years and had been in the Akron band Tin Huey. Pat begged for a guitar at twelve, but by his own account he was one of the worst guitarists in the neighborhood and could not sing a note. He bought a cheap drum kit with money from a teenage job and never took a lesson. What he really loved was his four track recorder. Their younger brothers, Michael and Geoff, were friends, and when they noticed both older boys were listening to the bluesman R.L. Burnside, they pushed them to jam together.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Both young men enrolled at the University of Akron, and both dropped out. Dan had fallen hard for the hypnotic Mississippi hill country blues of Junior Kimbrough. He later admitted he was getting failing grades because he was listening to Kimbrough records instead of studying. He made pilgrimages south to Kimbrough's juke joint, and once passed out on the floor of bluesman T-Model Ford's trailer in Greenville, Mississippi. Back home he spent a year and a half playing baritone guitar in the band of Ohio blues musician Patrick Sweany, and he fronted a bar band called the Barnburners. Pat, meanwhile, worked as a telemarketer. Neither had family money to fall back on, and they both said later that music was the only plan they had.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The basement tapes, 2001 to 2003

In the middle of 2001, Dan needed a demo so he could book shows outside Akron. Pat had recording gear in his basement and agreed to tape Dan's band. On the day, the rest of the band never showed up. Pat still thought of himself as a guitarist, but Dan told him to sit behind the drums anyway, saying it would probably sound cool precisely because he did not know what he was doing. They jammed through a handful of songs, including a Junior Kimbrough tune, and that recording became the Black Keys. Dan mailed the demo to around a dozen labels. The small Los Angeles label Alive signed them, and the band liked to say it was the only one willing to sign them without seeing them first.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The name has an odd and rather touching origin. Alfred McMoore was an Akron artist and an acquaintance of the band who lived with schizophrenia, and Chuck Auerbach, the folk art dealer, admired his work. When McMoore was upset with the boys' fathers, he would leave rambling messages on their answering machines calling them black keys, as in the black keys on a piano, a D flat. The phrase stuck. The duo's first proper show took place in 2002 at the Beachland Tavern in Cleveland in front of only a handful of people, and they were paid ten dollars. Dan later said they thought it was awesome to be paid at all.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Their debut album, The Big Come Up, came out on Alive in May 2002. It was made in Pat's basement with cheap microphones bought on eBay, mixing their own songs with covers of Muddy Waters, Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside and even the Beatles' She Said, She Said. It sold modestly, and to pay for a tour the two of them mowed lawns for their landlord. Pat's brother Michael designed the art, the start of a long run as the band's art director. The record got noticed. Seymour Stein of Sire Records talked to them almost daily for two months, but they chose the Mississippi label Fat Possum, home of Kimbrough and Burnside, because they felt a major would let them fizzle out.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Fat Possum advance went straight on rent, so their second album, Thickfreakness, was recorded in Pat's basement in a single fourteen hour session in December 2002, on an old eight track machine. They had tried sessions with a producer in San Francisco but threw them out for sounding too much like modern rock radio. Thickfreakness came out in April 2003, and Time magazine named it the third best album of the year. They drove nearly twenty four hours to play South by Southwest in a van they called the Gray Ghost. That summer they opened for Sleater-Kinney and Beck, whom they had met by sneaking into a Saturday Night Live after party and handing him a demo. By the end of the year exhaustion forced them to cancel European dates.[1] [2] [3] [4]

August 2003 brought their national television debut on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and the Reading and Leeds festivals. It also brought a comparison that followed them for years. Two people, the Midwest, the blues, a color in the name: critics kept calling them a lesser version of the White Stripes, although both Keys insisted they had not heard Jack White's band when they started. One of their earliest champions was the BBC's John Peel, the first DJ anywhere to play their music. They recorded three sessions for him, one of them at his own house, where they hung out with his family. They were on the way to a fourth session when they got the news that Peel had died.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rubber Factory and the road to Nonesuch, 2004 to 2007

For all the good reviews, the Black Keys were still broke. They could not get on the radio, and one month of European shows ended with a loss of three thousand dollars. So they changed their minds about something they had sworn off. After a long debate they licensed their song Set You Free to a Nissan commercial. As Pat later put it, nobody was hearing their music and they were not selling albums, so they took the money. It was the first of more than three hundred placements in ads, films, shows and video games. Dan argued that his heroes in blues and hip hop took every dollar they could get, and that the idea of selling out was an old indie rock hangup.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then they lost their studio. The landlord sold the house with the basement, so in early 2004 they went looking through Akron's empty industrial buildings and rented the second floor of an old General Tire factory for five hundred dollars a month. They called it Sentient Sound. Pat described it as too far away, hot as hell, with windows that did not open and horrible acoustics. Their mixing console, bought on eBay from a former sound man for the Canadian band Loverboy, kept breaking down and stretched the sessions to nearly five months. When they finished, they simply left it behind. Rubber Factory came out in September 2004 and became their first album on the Billboard 200. The comedian David Cross directed the video for 10 A.M. Automatic.[1] [2] [3]

By now the band had a real team. Their first manager and booking agent was David Viecelli, who saw them in Chicago on a tip from the owners of the Beachland in Cleveland. In 2005 they moved to the management company Q Prime, where John Peets would guide them for many years. In May 2006 they paid tribute to their hero with Chulahoma: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough, a short record of his songs. Kimbrough had died in 1998, and Dan never got to meet him. The CD included a letter from Dan explaining how Kimbrough's music made him drop out of college, and it closed with a phone message from Kimbrough's widow thanking them and saying they were the only band that really played like Junior.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Chulahoma completed their Fat Possum contract, and they signed with Nonesuch, part of the Warner family. Even with major label money available, they went straight back to Pat's basement to make Magic Potion, their first album of entirely original songs, released in September 2006. Pat later called it his biggest regret. By his account they paid three hundred and fifty dollars to have it mastered, it came back with almost no bass, and they mailed it off anyway. Still, the tour behind it was their biggest yet, in theaters holding around a thousand people. They also covered Bob Dylan's The Wicked Messenger for the soundtrack of the Dylan film I'm Not There, a sign that the wider music world was paying attention.[1] [2]

Danger Mouse and the near split, 2007 to 2009

In 2007 the producer Brian Burton, better known as Danger Mouse, was working on a record for the rock and roll pioneer Ike Turner, and he asked the Black Keys to write some songs for it. The project fell apart, and Turner died in December 2007. The duo kept the songs and asked Danger Mouse to produce them as their own fifth album. Attack and Release, released on the first of April 2008, was the first Black Keys album made in a professional studio and the first with an outside producer. It debuted at number fourteen. Pat's uncle Ralph played clarinet, flute and jaw harp on it, and Marc Ribot, who had played beside Ralph in Tom Waits' band, added guitar.[1] [2] [3]

The album also carried the first guest vocalist on any Black Keys record, the young Ohio singer Jessica Lea Mayfield, whom Dan had discovered through an EP pressed in a run of just one hundred copies. In October 2008 the duo opened for Devo at a benefit for Barack Obama at the Akron Civic Theatre, with Akron's own Chrissie Hynde also on the bill. But offstage, things were falling apart. Pat had married the writer Denise Grollmus in 2007 after years together, and the marriage was stormy. Dan disliked her from the start, and by 2009 he found it almost impossible to talk to his bandmate. Pat was depressed, drinking heavily and had put on twenty five pounds.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Into that tension came Dan's first solo album, Keep It Hid, recorded with the engineer Mark Neill and released in February 2009. Pat said he had not been told it was coming out, and he was livid. In his words, everybody knew but him, and he was angry at Dan, at their manager, at everyone. He came close to quitting, and the two barely spoke for months. Pat started a new band called Drummer, in which five Akron drummers played other instruments and he played bass. In August 2009, while his wife was on a research trip in Poland, Pat ended the marriage in a phone call. Both later aired their sides in print, and the divorce was bitter.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Once the marriage was over, Pat realized his anger at Dan was misplaced. He went into therapy, and the two sat down and talked about how much the band meant to them. Dan said they hugged, made up, and it was all good after that. Their next project was an unlikely one. Damon Dash, cofounder of Roc-A-Fella Records, had become obsessed with the Black Keys, and he brought them to a Brooklyn studio with rappers including Mos Def, Ludacris, RZA, Raekwon, Q-Tip and Nicole Wray, plus archival vocals from the late Ol' Dirty Bastard. The album, Blakroc, came out on Black Friday 2009. Dash later promoted limited edition Blakroc Camaros, which the band said they had nothing to do with.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Brothers and the breakthrough, 2009 to 2011

With Mark Neill producing, the reunited duo went south. They arrived at the old Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama on the sixteenth of August 2009, forty years to the day after the building's first hit was recorded there. The famous studio had been closed for years and was little more than a neglected museum, so they trucked in their own gear. Dan took the photos of legends off the walls because they were distracting. The first song they cut was Next Girl, and its lyrics about moving on after a bad relationship hit Pat hard in the best way. Dan said that from then on it was smooth sailing. In just ten days they recorded ten of the album's fifteen songs.[1] [2] [3]

There was nothing to do in town at night, so they went to Walmart and Cracker Barrel. One drunken night at the hotel, watching old clips of the bluesman Freddie King, they left a voicemail for their manager asking for a harpsichord. The next morning there was one in the studio. The tapes were later remixed by Tchad Blake. One song came from somewhere else entirely. Tighten Up, with its whistled opening, was the only track Danger Mouse produced, cut in Brooklyn. Pat said it was their conscious attempt to write something catchy enough for radio. Before it, the Black Keys had never had a song in regular rotation on rock radio.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Brothers came out on the eighteenth of May 2010 and sold about seventy three thousand copies in its first week, debuting at number three behind a Glee soundtrack and a Rolling Stones reissue. Tighten Up spent ten weeks at number one on the alternative chart and became their first entry on the Billboard Hot 100. Michael Carney's cover was just plain words on black, announcing that this was an album by the Black Keys called Brothers, which reminded many of an old Howlin' Wolf album sleeve. The disc label was printed in heat sensitive ink that turned from black to white as it played. The band had hoped to sell a quarter of a million copies over two years. They beat that in about a week.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Success came with side effects. After facing a crowd of around fifty thousand at Lollapalooza in August 2010, Pat developed severe stage fright that lasted for weeks. He went to a hypnotist before a show in Los Angeles, then sleepwalked out of his hotel room and woke up locked out in the hallway in his underwear. At the Grammys in February 2011, Brothers won Best Alternative Music Album, beating Arcade Fire, Tighten Up won Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, and Michael Carney won for the album packaging. By then both men had left Akron and bought homes in Nashville, where Dan built his own studio, Easy Eye Sound, in a building that once housed a call center.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

El Camino and the arenas, 2011 to 2013

Rather than milk Brothers, they made a bold decision on a snowy New York street. In January 2011 they cancelled shows in Australia, New Zealand and Europe, citing exhaustion, even though, with no insurance, it cost them about one hundred thousand dollars. Instead they went into Easy Eye Sound in Nashville on the third of March 2011 with no songs written at all. Over forty one days, the longest they had ever spent on an album, they wrote and recorded with Danger Mouse, now a full cowriter on every track. Because the slower Brothers songs had struggled on stage, they aimed for fast, punchy rock and roll inspired by the Clash, the Cramps, T. Rex and the Johnny Burnette Trio.[1] [2] [3]

They named the album El Camino after the Chevrolet car, as a joke, after seeing one on tour in Canada. Michael Carney then put a beaten up minivan on the cover instead, like the one they had first toured in. To promote it, the band placed an ad in the Akron Beacon Journal selling their old van as a 1994 El Camino, with a phone number that played a message from Pat, and Bob Odenkirk starred as a hapless used car salesman in a spoof ad. The video for the first single, Lonely Boy, was another happy accident. After an expensive scripted shoot came out badly, they used a single take of an extra and part time security guard, Derrick Tuggle, dancing outside a motel.[1] [2] [3]

El Camino arrived on the sixth of December 2011 and sold two hundred and six thousand copies in its first week, stuck at number two behind a Michael Bublé Christmas album. The band kept it off Spotify, with Dan calling the streaming payments laughable at the time. When their Madison Square Garden show went on sale, it sold out in fifteen minutes. In 2012 they played their first headlining arena tour, adding a touring bassist and keyboard player. Pat, never shy, told Rolling Stone that rock was dying because people had accepted Nickelback as the biggest band in the world. At the MTV Movie Awards they played Gold on the Ceiling with Johnny Depp on guitar.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At the Grammys in February 2013, El Camino won Best Rock Album, and Lonely Boy won Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song. The album was also nominated for Album of the Year. Dan was named Producer of the Year for El Camino and his work with Dr. John and the band Hacienda. With success, the band grew choosier about advertising. Pat said that two songs in Cadillac commercials looked greedy once you were actually selling records. They also went to court over ads that sounded suspiciously like them, settling claims with Pizza Hut and Home Depot in 2012 and suing a Louisiana casino in 2013 over a commercial they said ripped off Howlin' for You.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Turn Blue, feuds and a long silence, 2013 to 2018

Work on the eighth album was hard going. Sessions began in January 2013 at the Key Club studio in Benton Harbor, Michigan, around a console custom built for Sly Stone, but the songs felt safe and the mood got tense. A planned two weeks in Nashville ended after a single day when Dan, struggling with a vocal, walked out. His marriage to Stephanie Gonis, the mother of his daughter Sadie, was ending, and many details of their split were reported in the press. The divorce was finalized in August 2013 while they were recording at Sunset Sound in Hollywood. Dan said he had never leaned on music to get through something the way he did on that album.[1] [2] [3]

That same year a very public feud surfaced. During Jack White's divorce from the model and singer Karen Elson, court filings included an email in which White fumed that his children attended the same school as Dan's, accused Dan of copying him and called him an unprintable name. In a May 2014 Rolling Stone cover story White went further, saying that when he heard TV commercials that sounded like him, half the time it was the Black Keys. He also scoffed at their claim never to have heard the White Stripes. Pat answered calmly that divorce is hard, that it was a private conversation, and that he did not hold grudges. White later published an apology wishing the band every success.[1] [2]

The album, called Turn Blue after a catchphrase of the 1960s Cleveland TV horror host Ghoulardi, was announced in March 2014 through a tweet from Mike Tyson. The boxer had offered them a favor after they let him use a song in a documentary. Released in May 2014, Turn Blue debuted at number one in the United States with one hundred and sixty four thousand copies, narrowly beating a posthumous Michael Jackson album, and it also topped the charts in Canada and Australia. It was moodier and more psychedelic than El Camino. In January 2015 Pat broke and dislocated his shoulder in a swimming accident on vacation in Saint Barthélemy, and several tour dates were cancelled.[1] [2] [3]

The tour ended at Outside Lands in San Francisco in August 2015, and then the Black Keys simply stopped. Pat noted nervously that the Sex Pistols, the Band and the Beatles had all played their final shows in that city. Both men said years of nonstop touring had burned them out. Pat later said he spoke to Dan maybe twice in three years. In September 2015 Pat tweeted that Jack White had tried to fight him in a New York bar, calling him a bully. White replied that nobody had touched him and that he should talk face to face. Within a day Pat tweeted that they had talked for an hour and it was all good, and White publicly offered his respect.[1] [2] [3]

The hiatus years brought real loss. Dan formed a new band, the Arcs, and on the thirteenth of November 2015 they were onstage at Le Trianon in Paris when terrorists attacked the Bataclan less than three miles away. Dan's band was locked in the building for about an hour, and a longtime friend of his, the merchandise manager Nick Alexander, was killed at the Bataclan. In December 2017 Pat's uncle Ralph Carney died at sixty one after falling down the stairs at his home in Portland, Oregon. The two had written the theme to the animated series BoJack Horseman together. Then on the third of July 2018, Richard Swift, an Arcs member and the Keys' touring bassist in 2014, died at forty one of complications from alcohol addiction.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The return, 2018 to 2023

The nudge that brought them back came from an old Cleveland guitar hero. While Dan was recording with Joe Walsh at Easy Eye Sound, they talked about Glenn Schwartz, the original guitarist of the James Gang, who had inspired them both. They invited Schwartz in and recorded him playing for an hour and a half. Dan remembered watching Schwartz as a teenager and then trying to copy him while jamming with Pat, and right after the session he called his old partner. In the band's documentary Pat recalls that Dan also sent him a text with a photo of a gloomy Akron sky. On the fifth of September 2018 they were back in the studio, and within thirty minutes they had their first new idea.[1] [2]

The album they made, Let's Rock, got its title from a grim news story. In November 2018 the convicted murderer Edmund Zagorski was executed in Tennessee's electric chair, and his reported last words were let's rock. Dan read about it in a copy of The Tennessean left in the studio, and the phrase stuck with him. The record had no keyboards at all, and Pat called it an homage to the electric guitar. The first single, Lo/Hi, released in March 2019, became the first song ever to top four Billboard rock radio charts at the same time. Let's Rock came out on the twenty eighth of June 2019 and debuted at number four. The band refused to bundle it with concert tickets to boost sales.[1] [2]

Pat's personal life had settled too. In 2015 he had met the singer Michelle Branch at a Grammy party, and he cowrote and produced her 2017 album Hopeless Romantic. Their son Rhys was born in August 2018, and they married in April 2019. Late in 2019 Dan was producing the Louisiana bluesman Robert Finley with Kenny Brown, R.L. Burnside's longtime guitarist, and Eric Deaton, who had played bass for Junior Kimbrough. Dan called Pat and asked if he wanted to come hang out and jam. Pat said it was the first time in about ten years Dan had asked him to do that. In two afternoons they cut an album of hill country blues covers, Delta Kream, released in May 2021.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Original songs returned with Dropout Boogie in May 2022, featuring guests including Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. Its single Wild Child was later used as the theme for WWE's Royal Rumble. But that August, Pat's marriage made headlines. Michelle Branch, who had given birth to their daughter in February, publicly accused him of cheating on her. Within hours, according to the Los Angeles Times, police were called to their Nashville home, and Branch was arrested after admitting she had slapped Carney during an argument. He had no visible injuries. She filed for divorce, but the assault charge was dismissed at the state's request within two weeks, and the couple soon asked to suspend the divorce. Pat was on tour with the Black Keys throughout.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A rough year and a return to the roots, 2024 to 2026

The duo kept up a steady pace. Ohio Players, released in April 2024, featured Beck and Noel Gallagher, and its single Beautiful People earned Grammy nominations. That March, the documentary This Is a Film About the Black Keys, directed by Jeff Dupre, premiered at South by Southwest. It was surprisingly candid. The film more than once compares their partnership to an arranged marriage, and Dan's first wife spoke on camera about how the band's career had helped end their marriage. One scene showed Pat fuming at an empty soundcheck on the first day of their first arena tour while Dan was out shopping for a studded leather jacket. Dan summed them up as two hard headed people trapped together for eternity.[1] [2] [3]

Then came the worst year of their career. Their thirty one date North American arena tour, due to start that September, quietly vanished from ticket sites over Memorial Day weekend 2024, amid widespread reports of weak sales. The band promised a more intimate version, and soon split with their managers Irving Azoff and Steve Moir. Azoff's side called it an amicable parting. Pat tweeted, then deleted, that they had been badly let down and would explain how. Later he told Rolling Stone they had fired them, that they had sold nearly ten million dollars of tickets, that they were advised to cancel on a promise of smaller venues that did not exist, and that they had not even set the ticket prices.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In the autumn of 2024 the band drew more criticism for agreeing to headline a show in their hometown on the America Loves Crypto tour, an event tied to political groups spending heavily in Ohio's Senate race. GQ called the booking baffling. Pat's explanation was blunt: the cancellation had wiped out their income for the year, they had crew on retainer, and they were offered a lot of money. They had already gone back into the studio, writing with songwriters like Rick Nowels and Daniel Tashian. No Rain, No Flowers came out in August 2025, and its single The Night Before became their eighth number one on Billboard's alternative airplay chart. They toured theaters and amphitheaters instead of arenas.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the scenes, Dan's family was in crisis. His father Chuck suffered a stroke and was then diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and he stayed at Dan's home in Nashville as his health declined. Pat thought it would help his friend to have something to do, so they started jamming on old blues and soul songs with Kenny Brown, Eric Deaton and Jimbo Mathus, cutting everything live in one room with no separation, vocals included. Chuck Auerbach did not live to hear the finished record. Those sessions came out on the first of May 2026 as Peaches!, their third covers album. Dan said one song, It's a Dream, is hard for him to hear, because it felt like one last gift from his father.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

As of 2026, the Black Keys have released fourteen studio albums, won Grammys for Brothers and El Camino, and gone from an audience of a few friends in a Cleveland tavern to the biggest arenas in the world. Their influence reaches beyond their own records. Dan's Easy Eye Sound label and studio have produced artists from Robert Finley to Cage the Elephant, whose Auerbach produced album won a Grammy, and he worked on Lana Del Rey's Ultraviolence. Pat runs his own studio and produces other acts. Speaking in 2025, Pat said that in their mid forties they appreciated what they have together more than ever. Rolling Stone once ranked them among the twenty greatest duos of all time.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around The Black Keys

Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney. Neighbors who were barely friends as kids, they became one of rock's great partnerships almost by accident. They are opposites: Dan quiet and restless, Pat talkative and prone to comic outbursts. They nearly split in 2009, went years barely speaking during the late 2010s hiatus, and admit they avoid talking about feelings. Yet each crisis has pulled them closer. Dan calls them two hard headed people trapped together for eternity.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Black Keys and Danger Mouse. Brian Burton first approached them to write songs for an Ike Turner album, then produced Attack and Release in 2008 and the hit Tighten Up. On El Camino and Turn Blue he was a full cowriter as well as producer. The band said it took them a long time to trust an outsider that much. After Turn Blue they chose to produce themselves again.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Patrick Carney and Michael Carney. Pat's younger brother Michael has been the band's art director from the beginning, designing their album covers and T-shirts. He won a Grammy for the all text Brothers package, dreamed up the minivan on the El Camino cover, and returned for Peaches! in 2026. Michael was also friends with Dan's younger brother Geoff, which helped bring the two future bandmates together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Black Keys and Jack White. The feud began around 2010, when White said he had more to do with Jay-Z than the Black Keys, and deepened when he barred Dan from his Nashville studio. Divorce emails and a 2014 interview accusing the band of copying him followed, then an apology, then a 2015 bar confrontation that ended in an hour long talk. The two sides later made peace.[1] [2] [3]

Patrick Carney and Denise Grollmus. They met in high school and dated from about 2000, even forming a little indie pop duo called Churchbuilder. They married in 2007, but long tours, drinking and infidelity on both sides, by her own account, wrecked the marriage. Pat ended it in 2009. Both went public: Pat in Rolling Stone, and Grollmus in a long, raw essay for Salon in 2011.[1] [2] [3]

Patrick Carney and Michelle Branch. They met at a Grammy party in 2015, fell for each other while Pat produced her album Hopeless Romantic, and married in April 2019. They have a son and a daughter. In August 2022 she accused him of infidelity and was arrested after slapping him, but the charge was dismissed and they moved to suspend their divorce. They later reconciled, according to reports at the time.[1] [2] [3]

Patrick Carney and Ralph Carney. Pat's uncle Ralph was a saxophone and clarinet wizard who played with Tom Waits for decades and in the Akron band Tin Huey, which Pat idolized. Ralph played on Attack and Release and sometimes joined the band on stage. Uncle and nephew wrote the theme to BoJack Horseman together. Ralph died in December 2017 after a fall at home.[1] [2] [3]

Dan Auerbach and Junior Kimbrough. The Mississippi bluesman was the reason Dan dropped out of college. Dan studied his records obsessively and visited his juke joint, but Kimbrough died in 1998 before they could meet. The Black Keys covered him on their first album, made the Chulahoma tribute in 2006, and kept returning to his songs on Delta Kream and Peaches!, with musicians who once played in his band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Black Keys and Mark Neill. The California engineer helped Dan build his first analog home studio and recorded Keep It Hid at his house in La Mesa. He then co-produced Brothers, heading south with the duo and hauling vintage gear into Muscle Shoals. He credited that studio's odd, bass heavy acoustics for the album's sound.[1] [2]

The Black Keys and Irving Azoff. The band left longtime manager John Peets and signed with the powerful Azoff and his partner Steve Moir in 2021, hoping for bigger tours. After their 2024 arena tour was cancelled, they split. Azoff's camp called it amicable. Pat said they fired them and later criticized how closely management, ticketing and promotion are tied together in the music business.[1] [2] [3]

Dan Auerbach and Chuck Auerbach. Dan's father was an antiques and folk art dealer who raised him on blues and old country, took him to a Grateful Dead show, and wrote lyrics for some of Dan's songs. Dan says everything about his music and his look traces back to his dad. Chuck fell ill with cancer while living at Dan's home, and the Peaches! sessions were made in his final months.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dan Auerbach and Richard Swift. The singer and producer Richard Swift played bass for the Black Keys on tour in 2014 and was a member of Dan's side band the Arcs. Dan called him one of the most talented musicians he knew. Swift died in July 2018 at forty one, from complications of alcohol addiction, and Dan announced the news himself.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about The Black Keys

• The band's name came from answering machine messages left by an Akron artist who called their fathers black keys. Alfred McMoore, an Akron artist living with schizophrenia, left rambling messages for the boys' fathers when he was upset, calling them black keys, like a D flat on a piano. Dan's folk art dealer father admired his work.[1] [2]
• To pay for touring after their debut album, Dan and Pat mowed lawns for their landlord. The Big Come Up sold modestly at first and earned them very little, so the pair took lawn mowing jobs for their landlord to fund a tour. The album eventually sold around one hundred and thirty nine thousand copies.[1] [2] [3]
• Thickfreakness was recorded in one fourteen hour session because the label advance had gone on rent. In December 2002 the duo cut most of their second album in a single marathon session in Pat's basement on an early eighties Tascam eight track recorder. The liner notes jokingly called it Pat's patented medium fidelity technique.[1]
• The Black Keys met Beck by sneaking into a Saturday Night Live after party and handing him their demo. They crashed the party while on tour opening for Sleater-Kinney. Beck later took them out as his opening act on his 2003 Sea Change tour and appears in their 2024 documentary.[1] [2] [3]
• The mixing desk used on Rubber Factory once belonged to a sound man for the Canadian band Loverboy. Pat bought the console on eBay. It broke down so often that the sessions dragged on for nearly five months, and when they finished the album the band simply left it behind in the old tire factory.[1]
• The empty lot on the cover of the Lonely Boy single is where the Rubber Factory building once stood. Michael Carney went to photograph the old General Tire factory and found it had been demolished. He shot the bulldozer on the empty land instead, and Dan joked that the band kept stumbling into profound artistic statements.[1] [2]
• Comedian David Cross directed the Black Keys' video for 10 A.M. Automatic. The Arrested Development and Mr. Show star made the clip for the first single from Rubber Factory in 2004, years before the band became famous.[1]
• Pat Carney says Magic Potion is his biggest regret, because it was mastered for three hundred fifty dollars and came back with no bass. The band mailed the finished album off in a FedEx envelope anyway. Pat later said he regretted just accepting it rather than fixing the sound.[1]
• Attack and Release began life as songs written for an Ike Turner album produced by Danger Mouse. When the Turner project collapsed and the rock and roll pioneer died in December 2007, the Black Keys kept the songs and made them their fifth album, with Danger Mouse producing.[1] [2] [3]
• Dan discovered singer Jessica Lea Mayfield through an EP pressed in a run of just one hundred copies. She had made it at fifteen with her brother. Dan produced her debut album in his Akron home studio, and she became the first guest vocalist on any Black Keys record, on Attack and Release.[1]
• The Brothers CD label was printed in heat sensitive ink that turns from black to white as the disc spins. Pat said every ink supplier was contacted to make it happen. The black text only packaging won Michael Carney a Grammy for Best Recording Package in 2011.[1]
• A drunken voicemail asking their manager for a harpsichord produced one in the Muscle Shoals studio the next morning. Bored in rural Alabama, the band stayed up late at the hotel watching Freddie King clips. When they arrived at the studio the following day, a harpsichord was waiting.[1]
• They started recording Brothers at Muscle Shoals forty years to the day after the studio's first hit was cut there. They arrived on the sixteenth of August 2009, four decades after R.B. Greaves recorded Take a Letter Maria in the same building.[1]
• Tighten Up was the last song ever to win the Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. The award was dropped after that ceremony. Its first teaser video starred a dinosaur puppet named Frank.[1]
• The Lonely Boy dancer, Derrick Tuggle, was an extra and part time security guard. His one take dance outside a North Hollywood motel replaced an expensive scripted video. It later won him a cameo in Pharrell Williams' Happy video and a return in the band's 2024 single On the Game.[1]
• The band advertised their old tour van for sale in the Akron Beacon Journal as a 1994 El Camino. The ad's phone number played a message from Pat describing the van, and Bob Odenkirk starred as a desperate salesman in a spoof commercial to launch the album El Camino.[1] [2]
• Lonely Boy was the most played song on Australian radio in 2012. It logged more than eight hundred and eighty four hours of airplay, peaked at number two on the Australian singles chart, and came second in Triple J's Hottest 100 for 2011.[1] [2]
• Turn Blue was announced through a tweet from Mike Tyson. Tyson had called the band to thank them for letting him use a song in a documentary and offered them a favor. He had millions more followers than the band did.[1] [2]
• The album title Turn Blue came from the 1960s Cleveland TV horror host Ghoulardi. It was a catchphrase of Ernie Anderson's late night character. Pat called it a shout out to Ohio, and said it was Ghoulardi's way of telling people to get lost.[1]
• The title Let's Rock came from the reported last words of a man executed in Tennessee's electric chair. Edmund Zagorski was executed in November 2018. Dan read the story in a newspaper left in the studio and felt the words were absurd but somehow right for the album.[1]
• Lo/Hi was the first song ever to top four Billboard rock radio charts at the same time. In 2019 it led the Mainstream Rock, Adult Alternative, Rock Airplay and Alternative charts simultaneously. It was also the theme for TV coverage of that year's NCAA men's basketball tournament.[1]
• The theme song of the HBO series Hung was an early Black Keys track, I'll Be Your Man. The song comes from their 2002 debut album The Big Come Up, recorded in Pat Carney's basement.[1] [2]
• Pat Carney and his uncle Ralph wrote the theme music for the animated series BoJack Horseman. Ralph, a longtime Tom Waits sideman, died in 2017, and the show paid tribute to him in the opening credits of its fifth season.[1] [2]
• The legendary BBC DJ John Peel was the first person anywhere to play the Black Keys on the radio. They recorded three sessions for him, one at his house with his family. They were heading to a fourth when they heard he had died.[1]
• In 2010 Pat saw a hypnotist to beat stage fright and woke up locked out of his hotel room in his underwear. The panic began after playing to about fifty thousand people at Lollapalooza. After the hypnosis and a hotel party, he sleepwalked into the hallway and woke there at seven in the morning.[1]
• Stephen Colbert once staged a sell out contest between the Black Keys and Vampire Weekend. On The Colbert Report in January 2011, both bands listed the brands that had licensed their songs, to decide who would get Colbert's Grammy vote. He declared a draw.[1] [2]
• To make El Camino, the band cancelled an Australian tour that cost them about one hundred thousand dollars. They had no cancellation insurance. Pat said they decided on a New York street in a snowstorm that it was better to make a new record than tour Brothers for two more years.[1] [2]
• Kenny Brown suggested the Delta Kream cover of Louise after Dan brought out a guitar that belonged to Mississippi Fred McDowell. The album was cut in about ten hours over two afternoons with Brown, R.L. Burnside's guitarist, and Eric Deaton, Junior Kimbrough's bassist.[1] [2]
• Junior Kimbrough's widow appears on the Black Keys' tribute record Chulahoma. The final track is her thirty three second phone message thanking the band and saying they were the only band that really played like Junior.[1]
• Johnny Depp joined the Black Keys on guitar for Gold on the Ceiling at the 2012 MTV Movie Awards. One of the song's two videos, directed by Harmony Korine, showed the band being carried in baby carriers by giant doppelgangers played by college basketball players.[1]
• The Black Keys' Wild Child became the theme song of WWE's 2024 Royal Rumble. The single from Dropout Boogie also topped Billboard's adult alternative airplay chart and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance.[1]
• Dan Auerbach's first concert was Whitney Houston, and his second was the Grateful Dead. He saw Houston with his mother at Blossom Music Center, then went to the Dead with his father at the Richfield Coliseum in Ohio.[1] [2]
• The Black Keys once opened for Devo at a 2008 benefit for Barack Obama in Akron. Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, who went to the same Akron high school as Dan and Pat, followed their set at the Akron Civic Theatre.[1]
• Easy Eye Sound, Dan's Nashville studio, is in a building that once housed a call center. Dan says the plain building looks like a jail from the outside. The house band there includes veteran session players from classic 1960s and 1970s records.[1] [2]
• The Black Keys refused to put El Camino on Spotify when it came out. Dan said streaming paid so little it was laughable, and only Lonely Boy was made available. He argued that for a band living on record sales, streaming made no sense yet.[1] [2]
• Everything on Peaches! was recorded live in one room with no separation, vocals included. Pat said it was a nightmare to mix but ended up raw and filthy. The duo mixed it themselves.[1] [2] [3]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.