Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys picks his favourite Paul McCartney song
It’s nearly impossible to find a celebrated musician of the past five decades that wasn’t in some way touched by a handful of The Beatles’ creations or those of the members’ subsequent solo endeavours. Over the 1960s, the songwriting partnership of Paul McCartney and John Lennon changed Western culture for the better thanks to their progressive artistic approach and trend-setting image.
The Beatles’ dominion wasn’t confined merely to music, however. Consequentially, even those impartial to the band have been affected by the domino-tumbling cultural ripple of the four lads from Liverpool. As for The Black Keys’ singer and guitarist Dan Auerbach, he has been a lifelong Beatles fan and praises the band for having inspired elements of his artistic approach.
Auerbach formed The Black Keys in 2001 in Ohio with drummer Patrick Carney. Their music, alongside The White Stripes, championed a garage rock revival and was deeply informed by classic blues acts, including Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, Howlin’ Wolf, and Robert Johnson.
One might expect Auerbach to be more of a Rolling Stones fan, given the band’s more tightly blues-orientated sound, but from a young age, The Beatles had the edge for Auerbach, thanks to his father.
“I was raised on the Beatles,” Auerbach told Stereogum earlier this year. “Beatles over the Rolling Stones. My dad played them always. I had all those records memorised. I love every Beatles song. I don’t think there’s one I don’t like. The Beatles set the bar for creative LPs. When I talk about how I want my records to be like a mixtape, that’s basically how I felt about Beatles records. They had so much variation.”
“I was totally addicted to ‘Eleanor Rigby’ when I was a kid,” he added, picking out a personal favourite. “It has that magical quality. You don’t have to be a musician to connect with it. It has that pop thing. That’s what I think about pop — it’s the part of music where you don’t have to be a musician to appreciate it. It goes beyond that. Those guys just did that so often. They made it seem easy.”
After praising The Beatles’ fluid hit-making ability, Auerbach remembered the first time he met McCartney. “We played Jools Holland, and McCartney was on there,” he said. “I was so shocked. They do those three-part harmonies, and they just use wedges. Everybody else has the fancy in-ear monitors and a special monitoring guy, and they’re super old-school with it. He was super nice, shook our hands. I told him I was shocked he was using floor wedges [as opposed to in-ear monitors], and he looked at me like, ‘What else would I do? Why is that interesting to you?’”
Watch The Black Keys perform ‘Gold on the Ceiling’ during their 2013 appearance on the BBC’s Later… with Jools Holland.
Watch The Black Keys perform ‘Gold on the Ceiling’ during their 2013 appearance on the BBC’s Later… with Jools Holland.
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