Being the biggest band in the world is overrated, reckons Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach. Being the happiest one is where it’s at, offers drummer Patrick Carney. The Ohio alt.blues duo speak from hard-won experience. Now, a decade down the road from their four-year run of platinum sales, Grammy awards, burnout and premature greying (we’ll get to all that), twelfth album Ohio Players is the sound of rock stars enjoying their jobs again.
“There’s this thing that happens when you become a middle-aged rock’n’roller,” says Carney. “You’re supposed to become this kind of sullen, introspective, depressive person. But Dan and I, we had this kind of ‘aha!’ moment. We realised we needed to go and do some fun shit together, and it’ll come through on the record. Like, let’s do all the things that twenty years from now we’re gonna want to remember. We can do all this bullshit, and no one is gonna suggest it to us.”
