The Black Keys' Patrick Carney on the band's new album, documentary and road to success

The Black Keys – the duo of Akron natives Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney – are about to have a prolonged moment.

Two years after their last studio album “Dropout Boogie,” they’re back April 5 with “Ohio Players,” a release of blues-based funk.

But wait. There’s more. A documentary, “This is a Film About The Black Keys,” which premiered at SXSW last month, will screen at the Cleveland International Film Festival April 3.

It sets up a potentially busy year for a band that had a slow burn to the success they’ve enjoyed since starting out in Carney’s basement.

They pay homage to those beginnings with the album title, a nod to the Dayton-area funk band that enjoyed much of its fame in the 1970s courtesy of provocative album covers and danceable, funked-up tunes like “Fire” and “Love Rollercoaster.”

Carney, the band’s bespectacled drummer, is pretty sure his father, a retired Beacon Journal reporter, had a couple Ohio Players records laying about, but he gives credit to the “record hangs” he and Auerbach have had in cities playing old-school, danceable 45s for sparking interest in the band.

New Black Keys single may be most danceable tune yet

That influence shows up in “Beautiful People,” the first single off the album, an imminently danceable tune – perhaps the band’s most danceable yet – which was co-written with Beck Hansen (“Loser”).

It’s one of myriad collaborations on the album, which also includes work with Noel Gallagher of Oasis on “On the Game” and “Only Love Matters” and Memphis-based rapper Lil Noid on “Paper Crown,” representing an evolution for the band.

Carney and Auerbach, for much of their time together, were a two-man shop due to what Carney called “insecurity.”

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“I think we started really understanding the process of how to successfully create something with ‘El Camino’ [their breakout 2011 release] and [record producer/musician] Danger Mouse,” Carney said during a recent phone conversation from Nashville, their home base nowadays.

By that time, they were almost 10 years into their career with “El Camino,” their seventh studio album. Danger Mouse enjoyed equal footing on that album as a de facto band member with veto power.

“Ohio Players” is different in that they brought in people they wanted to work with and did most of the producing.

“It kind of brings a new energy to the project and a refreshed kind of creative outlook for us, I think,” Carney said.

The result: the aforementioned danceable “Beautiful People,” the moody “On the Game,” (a Carney fave and one of two songs written with Gallagher) and the hip-hop tinged “Paper Crown.”

Through it all, the requisite Black Keys blues riffs get their representation on an album that, when taken as a whole, sounds at home as the soundtrack to a Coen Brothers comedy.

“I like that. I'm into it,” Carney said when offered that description. “I think that the album is fun. When I describe that, it's like, I don't really know. I think that we were having a lot of fun while we made it, and I think that translates through the music, even on the heavier songs like ‘On the Game.’ I still think you can sense that we were enjoying ourselves. I like the idea of it being a comedy soundtrack, especially dark comedy. That would be good.”

The Black Keys' story makes for compelling film fodder

There is logic and symmetry, then, in the album coming out around the same time as the documentary “This is a Film About The Black Keys,” which documents their more than 20 years together courtesy of award-winning director Jeff Dupre (“Never Let Him Go”).

After a suggestion by friend Carter Little, who also produces the film, those decades together served as an impetus for wanting to look back.

The Black Keys didn’t explode on the scene. Carney rightly points out that it took until their sixth album, “Brothers,” which was multiplied by “El Camino,” to achieve mass appeal. The documentary footage, including some from their days touring the country in a minivan, offers an unfiltered look into the less glamorous aspects of making a living as a musician.

“There's the first eight, nine years of being in a band where we were playing to the relatively cult following,” he said.

Carney admitted that some of the footage was difficult to watch, but it was necessary to include.

“I thought it was interesting to kind of show the whole origin story, especially to a younger fan who had no real concepts," Carney said. "And so yeah, it was cool. We get to watch the documentary, and it was a lot of work to help them put it together, but I think it comes across really well. It does what I wanted it to do.”

The duo is at an intriguing juncture of their career. Those first years were a grind, but they’ve evolved artistically and in status to the point where “Ohio Players” and the documentary generate buzz. The reality is that their current position serves as a reflection point for how far they've come.

The Black Keys surprised by level of success

That look back includes the confession that the level of success they’ve achieved isn’t what was expected.

“When we first had the band, the biggest concert I'd ever attended was at the Agora Theater,” Carney said of the legendary Cleveland rock club. “So, for me that was kind of what I considered the pinnacle for what would success be, and I think a lot of the bands I was seeing at that time were playing like the Odeon or Beachland Ballroom. So that was when we first started getting into those rooms, that's when I thought that we got into the top [of] where we could ever get.”

Sometimes it’s nice to get it wrong, but exceeding expectations has offered its own challenges.

The pressure associated with success has exerted itself on their friendship, which included prolonged times without communication, but the success has also enhanced it, Carney said. Like any long-time partnership, it took work.

“I was happy to share it, but yeah, there are moments where it's a little bit - you get squeamish being open - but that was kind of the name to the game for the documentary is that we were going to do it,” he said. “It had to be authentic, it had to be real, and it couldn't just be some advertisement for the band.”

Patrick Carney prefers to not look back

By now, Carney and Auerbach don’t necessarily need advertising. Their friendship is stronger than ever, Carney said. Ultimately, they’re in a spot that other Akronites such as Devo and LeBron James occupy – one where legacy is considered beyond the confines of Northeast Ohio.

Carney said they aren’t necessarily looking to the past to define themselves.

“I think what scares us is the idea of not making music that's relevant ... being a throwback band or something like that doesn't seem appealing to us,” he said. “...[W]e want to also have fans that are connected to the current music that we're making as well. I think that that's important. It gives you some self-worth, I think.”

Still, with those 20-plus years, there’s a possibility their success and, by extension, their legacy, takes them up the road to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the Cleveland-based tabernacle of pop music where Carney said the band’s most recent collaborators – Beck and Noel Gallagher – and Devo, who is also the subject of a recent documentary, belong.

“If we ever got in inducted into the Rock of Hall thing, we would never protest the thing. We would go,” he said, “but there's a lot of artists that I think should be in there who aren't in there.”

George M. Thomas dabbles in film, television and, apparently, music for the Beacon Journal.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: The Black Keys' Patrick Carney discusses band's new album, documentary