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talesfromthemightyi · 30 days

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The Black Keys on writing with Noel: “It couldn’t have gone smoother!”

With the new Black Keys LP on the way, it’s only right that a consolidated write-up piece that collects every bit of information important to the lead up and collaboration between The Black Keys and Noel, be delivered in such a way that, hopefully gives you the full scope of their collaboration.

Patrick, Dan and Noel will tell it all.

Though mostly Patrick talks through everything about the record all the way back from 2023 to most recently with Joe Rogan, so we’ll start there. And fair warning, there will be a few repeated lines as per the promotional jargon they’ve managed to whittle down before every time the duo speaks about the new LP.

It will jump back and forth, so there’s that to look out for as well.

Let’s start.

Patrick Carney to Rogan: “We made our new record collaborating with people, and one of the guys we wanted to work with was Noel Gallagher from Oasis. So we kept reaching out to him, seeing if he would be up for it, and we kept hearing back that he doesn’t really do that (co-writing songs). And I remembered that my neighbor, who I golf with, used to be Oasis’ agent. So I asked him if he could reach out and through that, we heard back that Noel would be up for recording with us, if we went to London. So we flew all the way to London and rented this small, little studio (Toe Rag Studios). And we barely knew Noel, we met him briefly. But we went in there with no song and sat down with him, and within a couple hours we had a song written and recorded.”

Pat (cont.): “And we did it three days in a row. And we had four days booked. After the first day, we got what we needed. It’d be cool if we got more…–”

Dan Auerbach (interjected): “The rest will be gravy, but we got what we needed. We came for the trip!”

Pat: “Yep, and the second day we got ‘On The Game’, and the third day we got a song called ‘Only Love Matters’ but the fourth day we showed up and were like, ‘We are NOT fucking pressing it!’. We went three-for-three. But let’s not fuck this up. So we spent the whole (fourth) day just bullshitting with him.”

Dan: “It was such an amazing feeling being in the room with him (Noel). We cut it in a studio called Toe Rag and the live room is this size, like this room (points out to the room). Pat’s drum kit is here (points again), little keyboard here, I’m right there and Noel’s right there. We were just in a circle and, you know, what you hear on the record is (one of the live takes) we did. It was like, the second or third time we got through the song without fucking it up. [..] It is the best feeling. It’s the most addictive thing ever, being able to get in the studio and make something out of nothing like that.”

Rogan speaks up briefly to praise ‘On The Game’ from Noel and the band, and expresses that he’s grateful to have been able to listen to Ohio Players early. When asking about the origins of the band and the meaning of the track, Pat lets on about a day at the Chiltern Firehouse where Noel would frequent.

Pat: “The cool thing about ‘On The Game’, we got everything but the lyrics. But the melody was there. We kind of made a point (in) making this album that for the first time we were going to, I guess, kind of do it the way that maybe bands used to do it in the 70s. We were going to stay at the nicest hotels, the funnest– the MOST fun hotels. We were going to have fun. So when we’re out in London, we were staying at the Chiltern Firehouse, just kind of partying every single night, and then dragging ourselves to the studio. One night, Noel was hanging out with us and he was like, pointing to some girl at the bar, he’s like, ‘Oh, she’s for sure on the game!’. And we’ve been to England fifty times but we never heard that expression. We’re like, ‘what’s that?’ and he’s like, ‘Oh, she’s a working girl, she’s probably… you know, she’s probably a prostitute.’ Which checks out, I think! And then Dan was like, ‘Yeah, everybody here is on the game.’ But making this record was so much fun.”

You can watch that podcast here for the rest of the episode.

Earlier in the year, the band also sat down with Uncut Magazine and gave the album a preview for their January 2024 Album Preview issue.

Pat starts, “Dan makes a lot of records for Easy Eye, and when he does those, he’s always writing and collaborating with the artists. But the only other person we’d written with was Danger Mouse. So this time we decided to go a little deeper into our rolodex and call some people we’d been talking about working with for a long time,” says Carney.

“We just hit the ground running and we’re making songs as soon as we can.” Auerbach interjects.

Carney continued, “It came out so easy that we were trying to think of other people that we could throw in the mix, and the person at the top of the list was Noel Gallagher. Everyone was like, ‘Noel doesn’t really write with other people.’ But he agreed to meet us in London. We booked some time at Toe Rag and recorded two songs with Noel in three days.”

In London back in 2023, Pat also briefly spoke to NME about that. “When you’re coming up, it can often feel like competition and you’re constantly stressed. Now, we’re at the point where we can just enjoy everything,” signaling a new start and reference to a newer sound of their, yet-to-be-finished (at the time), 12th studio album.

“The key to our sound is embracing the human element. None of us are virtuosic musicians, there’s just a lot of raw rock ‘n’ roll.”

That same interview was in anticipation of kicking off their UK leg of shows in June 2023 at The O2, Hydro and so forth.

The band would, at the time, also host DJ nights and continues to do so to this day.

“It’s just us, partying. We don’t want to go to some crummy bar after the show and listen to shitty music. We’d stay backstage and play music but there’s no one else there, which is kind of boring. This is a way for us to control the jukebox and hangout together. We’ve done a lot of growing up in the last 10 years. Dan and I have always been close but we’ve got a very deep friendship right now. We enjoy hanging out. Getting to go on tour with your friend, it makes the whole thing feel more exciting.”

Carney continues, “When we got back in the studio in 2021, to record what would become Dropout Boogie, something had changed. Obviously the whole world had changed but a year of isolation was enough to change the dynamic between Dan and I. We were really, really, really excited to see each other every day.”

In 2021, that work translated into 9 straight weeks of back-and-forth recording in between touring. Never forgetting to mention that even then, the results would ring in the best sounds possible for the duo and would later, actually, keep going.

“But we just kept working. By the end of the year, we had 17 new ideas down and we just kept going, [..] that was the beginning of what we’re finishing now, an epic album that’s our best record for sure. It won’t be out until next year, though. It’s a weird, full circle thing.”

At the time of the interview, Carney didn’t want to 'give too much away' about 'the new evolution of The Black Keys.' It’s important to note that at the time, in 2021, those sessions would spawn more than 40 newer recordings from the duo, minus collaborations from then.

He does go on about smaller details to end on and also mentions Gallagher for the first time, in this NME interview.

“We’re working with a lot of people and the vibe of the record is fun. It’s very reflective of our DJ nights in a way, it’s a big Saturday night party record. We just had people come through the studio and throw a little bit of special sauce at each song. There are just so many different collaborations but there’s a thread through it with Dan and I filtering everything. It just feels really fucking amazing.”

In steps Noel.

“He’s hilarious and super talented! We were referring to him as ‘the Chord Lord’ because he’s just a perfectionist with it. Dan and I are big fans of him and Liam. Actually, the Liam song ‘Everything’s Electric’ is why we decided to work with Kurstin.”

In speaking to the vibe of the album in the NME interview, Carney would also go on to say that, “Danger Mouse showed us the trick to collaborating and that’s someone we need to work with again soon. We used to be pretty insular. We were two friends from Akron who didn’t really take part in any music scene, and we weren’t able to hang out backstage early on in our career, because we had to drive to the next show. Now, we’re thriving because we’re including our friends and being more inclusive. That’s what the vibe is with this record.”

The same sentiment is shared between Auerbach, most definitely, when he also spoke with Rolling Stone at the beginning of this year.

“No matter who we work with, it never feels like we’re sacrificing who we are. It only feels like it adds some special flavor. We just expanded that palette with people we wanted to work with. We were there to support them and their ideas, to do whatever we could to see that moment flourish. But when it came time to finish the album, it was just Pat and me.”

And back to the Uncut interview.

Carney says, “(With other artists), most of the time we’d have the music there (already), so we were just looking for words and melody. But with Noel, we started the songs from scratch. Noel is hilarious and we hit it off instantly. It couldn’t have gone smoother. He was very meticulous about finding the right transitional chords for each section, it was amazing!”

“At Toe Rag, we were all in the room: Pat with the drums,” Auerbach continues, “I was playing the bass, Noel had his 335, and our friend Leon was on keyboards. We were just in a circle in this tiny room, recording live, working up songs in real time, literally figuring out chord changes and melodies. Every song that we got with Noel is a live-take, it just felt really good.”

Another key element I wanted to add here, in finding similar pieces on their collaboration there are details that get left out over time, or other details that get added in. All of the same answers are all similar enough that you can hopefully get a sense of the story through-out. It is literal repeated answers from these interviews from The Black Keys, that it hopefully drives home the spirit and ritualistic practice of recording and songwriting, so I am very aware they’re all similar.

But that is the point here.

Similarly, Noel spoke about the duo on Matt Morgan’s podcast back in August of 2023, “Recently, I was writing with The Black Keys, and I’d never really met them before– that really did work!”

The sound?

“If you can imagine my good self and them, that’s what it is. It’s not swampy blues, and it’s not my kind of guitar-pop or whatever you want to call it. It’s somewhere in between… it’s really fucking good!”

Gallagher continued, “There’s a song called It’s Only Love That Matters, and it’s really fucking good!”

“I’d met Patrick maybe once, but I don’t know them, and they called up my office and asked if I’d be interested in writing with them and we all went at it and did like three tunes in five days.”

Once again, more details get added into the story. In keeping with all answers about recording new music, Noel somehow remembers that it was five days instead of four days, like Pat says, but let’s forget that for a second.

Noel continues, “Patrick and Dan would sit opposite each other, and somebody would play a drum beat. Dan would come up with a chord, and then I’d be like, ‘What if it went there?’. The tunes we’ve done together are pretty cool I think.”

“There was five of them (in the sessions) and one of me, I really enjoyed it!”

And so we’ve made it to the end!

The two recordings co-written and produced from this three day session in London back in 2023 would later turn out to be, ‘Everybody’s On the Game’ and ‘It’s Only Love that Matters’.

These are of course their full titles that did indeed make the cut out of the 16-track collection for Ohio Players and were later shortened down to ‘On the Game’ and ‘Only Love Matters’, which was then also shortly revealed by Nonesuch Records on both their store and website in late January of this year.

The year prior, after said collaboration, Noel would also be hard at work on putting the finishing touches to what would eventually be the fourth LP released under the High Flying Birds pseudonym, Council Skies.

Council Skies hit store shelves on June 2, 2023. The album contained 10 tracks and 1 bonus track on the Deluxe edition of the album. The Black Keys did not offer anything back in songwriting or recording duties for the fourth High Flying Birds LP.

OHIO PLAYERS by The Black Keys is out on April 5, 2024.

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