The Black Keys Dissect 'Howlin' for You' and Show How It Influenced the New 'Dropout Boogie'

The Black Keys paid homage to the blues music that made them a band on last year’s Delta Kream. On Dropout Boogie, the follow-up to Delta Kream and their 11th studio album, Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney go back to the garage. Or at least to the sense of urgency that shaped 2010’s Brothers, the duo’s breakthrough LP that featured one of their best-known blues-rock monsters, “Howlin’ for You.” In the latest installment of Rolling Stone’s series The Breakdown, Auerbach and Carney walked us through the making of “Howlin’ for You” in Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville, pointing out the similarities to their latest LP, out now, along the way. “Dropout Boogie has a lot of elements that are shared with ‘Howlin’ for You’: simplicity, the directness,” Carney tells Rolling Stone. “I think that the urgency that that song was made with, we didn’t wake up the next day and want to open it back up. We got through the song, finished it and we were on to the next thing. That’s kind of how we like to work.”