INTERVIEW: PATRICK CARNEY OF THE BLACK KEYS

“Last year fucking sucked!”

The Black Keys’ drummer Patrick Carney was on the other end of CleveRock’s interview hotline, and he didn’t mince words about how the year 2024 went for his two-man project (opposite Dan Auberbach). Black Keys were victims of an ambitious tour being canceled, disappointing their widespread fan base, leaving their crew unemployed, taking a hit to their pocketbooks, and facilitating wholesale changes for their business team.

“We learned valuable information about the modern state of the music business,” Carney continued. “I think the thing is, unfortunately, that when I read books about the concert industry, or watch documentaries, everybody, at some point, got burned from some sort of fucked up aspect of the music industry. But the thing is, it constantly changes. It always gets corrected once enough artists get fucked by it.”

This could have been the sole topic of this interviewer’s 15-minute allotted timeslot. There’s so much to unpack here, and this writer has a deep fascination with the insider baseball in the music industry. And, while out of the gate, Carney seemed like he could be candid on the topic, artists’ guards usually raise at some point.

Quickly shifting gears to the Black Keys’ 2025 No Rain, No Flowers tour (supporting the album of the same name, which dropped 14 hours before this August 8, 2025 interview), Carney said he and Auerbach are excited to be back on the road, playing in many of the cities that saw canceled shows on their previously scheduled trek.

“We’re putting in the work this summer. We’ve been on the road since mid-May, with the exception of about 20 days off, spread out. And the shows have been great,” he said. “We just did a month in Europe as well, and that was incredible. We did our biggest headlining show to date in London, 14,000 people, and it was kind of magical. We’re in the Midwest and in the summer, kind of, it almost feels like a vacation because we feel like we’re at home, whether we’re in Milwaukee; Cleveland… It’s where we probably played more shows than anywhere else because we were living in Akron, and we would constantly be getting all the gigs within an eight-hour drive. We’re excited!”

Carney and Auerbach, Northeast Ohio natives, lived near Blossom Music Center, the largest-capacity concert venue in their hometown’s vicinity. They will be performing on that stage for the second time in their 23-year (and counting) career on Friday, August 22 {Deets & Tix}. Surely, a big music fan turned professional musician must have attended a boatload of shows while growing up?

“I only attended one concert at Blossom,” he admitted. “It was the band Travis. I got free tickets because I worked at the record store, Quonset Hut. It was on a Monday. That’s the only time I went there. I worked for a company that catered all of the Blossom shows, and the year that Devo played Lollapalooza, I wanted to see them. They were my favorite band at the time, and I had to work that night, but not at the venue.”

Blossom is a prominent venue locally, but by no means the biggest stage Dan & Patrick have played. From their humble beginnings at Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland to Akron’s (now-closed) Lime Spider and (also now-closed) Annabell’s, BK have become one of Northeast Ohio’s most prized exports (behind rubber, DEVO, and LeBron James and slightly ahead of The Pretenders and Hugh Downs). The Black Keys released a limited-run vinyl of a live recording of their first-ever show in 2002. These guys were something special from their first time in front of an audience. Things just grew, and grew, then grew some more. The crowds got larger. The venues got bigger. The album sales trended upward. The radio hits came. And, eventually, they became an international touring powerhouse. It sure as hell didn’t happen overnight.

Asked about when they had an inkling that one day they would be touring amphitheaters and arenas?

“I never considered that,” Carney answered. “It wasn’t until maybe 2008 or 2009 that I thought we might be able to play Madison Square Garden, because we were selling 6,000 – 7,000 tickets in New York City. I never considered that we’d be able to do it in Cleveland because I never went to a show at the arena or the Coliseum. I never went to any arena shows. None of the bands I really liked were playing there. The biggest thing we play would be like the Grog Shop; smaller places like that. But yeah, when we first got to the point where we were selling out 350 capacity rooms, I literally thought that we had just made it. We got to the top and thought that there was nowhere else to go. Our booking agent was like, ‘No! There’s more if you want it!’And luckily, people were there.”

Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, also an Akron native, wrote a song about returning to her hometown in 1984, titled “My City Was Gone.” The motif of the tune is that Akron changed to the point where it was no longer familiar to her. The song talks about farms being replaced by shopping malls and the changes on South Howard Street.

Carney departed from Akron (can you blame him?) well over a decade ago. If Auberach and he were to write a similar song, what would the lyrics sound like?

“For me, the city’s the people, and a lot of them are gone, but a lot of them are still there. It’s a weird thing, when I go home, I haven’t lived there in 15 16 years, but I know every single fucking street in that city, and I feel at home, and I have my little rituals,” Carney said. “If I had to write a song about it, it would be from a different vein than that. But I see where Chrissie was coming from because for her, it was that they tore down this huge section downtown, South Howard Street, when she was probably in her late teens, and the city got completely changed, but that’s what I grew up in. I grew up in Akron when downtown was porno theaters and pawn shops. Now it’s not, which is good, maybe, but I don’t know what we’d write about. But I think the thing is, it’s that weird thing, where no matter how much it changes, and who leaves, I’m still free to come home.”

The Black Keys recently released (and, by recently, I mean the morning of this chat), studio album marks the next chapter in the band’s impressive career. Does the thrill of releasing an album to fans ever lose its luster?

“It’s always exciting to put a record out, and this is the 13th time doing it,” Carney said. “I’ve kind of been reflecting the last day on what it was like each time before, starting from the very first one when it just creeped out, and there were no reviews and no press, and it just had to grow organically, usually from when record store clerks suggested to customers and slowly it turned into a thing, and that started our career. And then, when ‘El Camino’ came out, and then ‘Turn Blues,’ those were really big, huge moments for us with lots of press. Those were kind of heavy pressure, and stressful, but exciting times. Now, it’s cool to just get to see that it resonates with the fans, but really, at the end of the day, being the music, it’s just something that I love doing and just hope that there’s an audience, and we’re still surprised that there is an audience for it. It has been pretty much that way since day one, and it’s cool. It’s a fun journey.”

At the band’s inception, an album’s success had two unequal measures: album sales and critical acclaim. 2025 is an entirely different ballgame. Streaming numbers, comments on YouTube videos, and fan engagement across social media networks seem to be the new gauge for determining if an album is “successful.” Carney’s thoughts on the matter?

“When we first started, the first couple of records, when we were on Fat Possum, and when we signed with Epitaph, who owned it at the time, the owner pulled us aside and said that there was a lot of ‘gold’ in the building. 10,000 records is punk rock gold,” he reflected. “That’s what you need to strive for. And so, I remember, that that was the first goal we were trying to achieve. Everything else was a bonus. I mean, I still get a kick out of it when we get a song that goes gold. That feels like something real. And at this point, we have a number of Gold singles. That feels like something.”

The world is a fucked up place. No matter one’s beliefs, creeds, political affiliation, or values, there is something for everyone to hate and fear. One thing that everyone has in common? Music serves as an escape. Concerts are a place of refuge. Artists, from local kids in the clubs to the Black Keys, all the way up to Taylor Swift, have a responsibility to provide that safe space to forget all of the planet’s bullshit and just get lost in the art, even if only for a few hours. Carney was asked to reflect on this responsibility.

“I spend my evenings at home, deep into YouTube, watching conspiracy theories, all this shit, and music has always been the great escape. I’m listening to a soul song from 1973. Unless it’s a political song, I’m not really considering anything other than the music, and it’s a true escape,” he said. “I think it’s hard to get away from shit, even at the Sunday dinner table conversation. I think the country’s been profoundly changed over the last 15 years by technology and politics, and the one thing I see running through it is that it’s billionaires running the country, and it just never really seems like that was the way it was intended to be, at least post-1920. So it’s frustrating, and that’s what music’s there for. Let’s let it all out.“