Dan Auerbach

The Black Keys’ singer-guitarist on getting to record with his blues heroes and missing John Prine

Dan auerbach was in his Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville in 2019 producing an album for soul singer Robert Finley when he had the urge to call his Black Keys bandmate, drummer Patrick Carney. Guitarist Kenny Brown and bassist Eric Deaton, who played with legendary bluesmen R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, were together in the same room at Easy Eye. Auerbach couldn’t resist the chance to jam on the vintage blues songs that shaped the Black Keys with the very men who played them. The result is Delta Kream, the Black Keys’ 10th studio album, which consists entirely of classic-blues covers. “I wasn’t thinking about making a record,” Auerbach says. “We just wanted to play some of these songs that we loved. It took us a day to do it. Most of the thing is first or second takes.”

Delta Kream celebrates the Hill Country blues of northern Mississippi, particularly R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. Why do those two players deserve a closer look?

They were so pivotal in our careers. It’s what brought us together. It was the concentric circle, where on the outside, Pat and I liked totally different things, but in the middle it was Junior and R.L. We could drive down the highway all night and listen to them. It was just endless inspiration for us. Sometimes it’s got, like, the charm of the Shaggs, sometimes it sounds like the Velvet Underground or the Grateful Dead. And it’s hypnotic.

You never got the chance to see Kimbrough play live, but you did make a pilgrimage to his juke joint in Mississippi. How old were you?

I was like 18. I went with my dad. That’s when his son Kinny told us that [ Junior had] been sick and he’d had, like, a leg amputated a couple of months earlier. But [Kinny] said, “My brother is in jail right now. If you loan us money for the bond to get him out, we’ll pay you back. And he plays all Dad’s songs.”

And it was David Kimbrough. So I heard all of Junior’s songs, and it was really amazing.

Have your thoughts on being a white person playing the blues changed over the years? Is it something you think about in a different way than when you first started out?

You know, all I could really speak on is my personal experience. I knew blues music before I knew Rage Against the Machine, before I heard of anybody, really. I felt a really close connection to it. I got to see R.L. Burnside play in Cleveland and Columbus. I went all over to see him, and he was there living, breathing, playing these songs, packing these little rock & roll clubs. Junior Kimbrough and the Beatles were equals — that’s a perspective that Pat and I come from.

But also just being there and hanging out with T-Model [Ford] and playing that music and getting to learn from some of these guys, it made me feel even more connected to it.

Do you hear from fans who say that you and Pat have turned them on to black bluesmen of the past?

All the time. People tell us that they got into Junior, that they got into T-Model. I definitely love that about the platform that we have — being able to share with our fans the music that we love, the music that inspired us.

You filmed the video for “Crawling Kingsnake” at Jimmy Duck Holmes’ juke joint in Bentonia, Mississippi. What’s special about that venue?

Well, it’s the oldest running juke joint in America. Jimmy Duck’s parents opened it up, so it just felt like it was an amazing place to kind of tell the story of the music, tell the story of Jimmy Duck, and just give props to a national treasure. He really is the last link to that Bentonia style of blues, which was popularized by Skip James.

You’ve become an in-demand producer, but you’ve said some of the artists you work with don’t know who the Black Keys are. Does that anonymity help you in the studio?

I’d rather they know as little about me as possible. We’re trying to craft someone’s story. It’s their future and it’s their past, all rolled into one. I’ll go out there and fucking hit the woodblocks on a song if that’s all it needs.

It’s been a year since John Prine died. What do you miss most about him?

I miss going out to dinner with him. The last time I saw him was at Dan Tana’s [in L.A.]. We were out there for the Grammys, and he asked if I wanted to go to dinner because I had hipped him to an Italian spot in Nashville and it became his favorite restaurant. So he’s like, “When you’re in L.A., I want to show you my go-to.” Writing songs with him was like being part of a séance or something, but when we got to just hang out, that was the most fun. Driving around with him and going to White Castle. He was just living life to its fullest. His driveway was bursting with Cadillacs.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Black Keys. Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?

In my personal life, yes. But every musical decision that we made kind of ended up working out in our favor. We saw a lot of bands just jump from zero to 100 and start headlining festivals and then they’re gone. We’re still here. I think that in our own stupid way, we did the right thing.