The Black Keys at Musikfest

The Black Keys
with special guest The Velveteers
Price: $50-$169 | Steel Terrace: $279
Venue: Wind Creek Steel Stage at PNC Plaza
Buy Tickets: https://www.musikfest.org/event/17111/the-black-keys/
Tickets on sale: Friday, 3/21, 10 a.m.
Yuengling Flight Deck Oasis Pass
*The Yuengling Flight Deck Oasis Pass is an add-on upgrade and does NOT grant access to the Wind Creek Steel Stage ticketed concert.
A Yuengling Flight Deck Oasis Pass is admission to the Yuengling Flight Deck Oasis area of the Wind Creek Steel Stage which includes a cash bar and air conditioned restrooms. Purchasing TWO Yuengling Flight Deck Oasis Passes will also receive ONE parking pass for the lot located across from the venue. NO refunds.
Gates: 6 p.m. | Show: 7 p.m.
*Gate and show times are subject to change.
ABOUT THE BLACK KEYS
The story of Ohio Players—The Black Keys’ twelfth studio album and a record unlike any other in their long ride through deep blues and soul power—begins on a Saturday in February 2003. Singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney were on the road supporting their debut album, 2002’s The Big Come Up, opening for Sleater-Kinney at New York’s Roseland Ballroom, when the headliners invited them to a party after the gig: the traditional bash following the broadcast of Saturday Night Live with the TV show’s cast and guests.
“This is insane—of course, we want to go,” Carney recalls. “We said ‘How are you getting in?’ ‘Our friend Beck played tonight.’”
Auerbach and Carney were school friends in Akron, Ohio, not yet a band, when Beck’s 1993 single “Loser” —a landmark fusion of Delta blues, hip-hop churn, and post-punk lyricism—hit them like a bomb. “His aesthetic was incredible,” Auerbach says today. “He wore his influences on his sleeve, and we learned from that. There was someone showing us a way to go.”
At the SNL party, Carney handed Beck an advance copy of The Black Keys’ next album, Thickfreakness. Three weeks later, they were offered the opening slot on Beck’s 2003 Sea Change tour. “The Beck influence on The Black Keys was massive,” Carney states gratefully. “He was one of our most vocal, early supporters.”
Beck is now all over Ohio Players, collaborating with The Black Keys as a writer, singer, and instrumentalist on seven of the album’s fourteen tracks. Also contributing across this all-star affair are ex-Oasis guitarist and songwriter Noel Gallagher (three songs); the pioneering hip-hop producer Dan The Automator (two tracks); Memphis-rap cult legends Juicy J and Lil Noid; Leon Michels, who plays with Auerbach in the Arcs; and superstar producer Greg Kurstin (Adele, Foo Fighters), who first met The Black Keys when he was in Beck’s band on that 2003 tour. Many of the backing musicians on Ohio Players are veterans of Black Keys sessions and Auerbach’s productions at Easy Eye Sound in Nashville.
“We had this epiphany—we can call our friends to help us make music,” Carney explains. “It’s funny because we both write songs with other people” for solo and side projects. “But we got to this maturity as a band where not only can we call these friends, but we can deliver music our idols want to play on.”
“We were unafraid to have fun,” Auerbach says, “and dip into everything we’ve always loved”—something he and Carney do as DJs, hosting record-party nights in clubs with their favorite 45s and rare-vinyl finds. “When we’re DJ-ing, we’re playing cumbia, soul, rockabilly. It’s all over the place. When it came time to gather songs for this album, it was that spirit of tying it all together.”
Ohio Players opens with the thick, funky stride of “This Is Nowhere,” born at The Black Keys’ first writing date with Beck at Easy Eye in 2022. The album then swings in mood and groove from the densely layered party time of “Beautiful People (Stay High),” built with Dan The Automator, to the Beatlesque stomp of “On the Game” with Gallagher and the dark-pop gloss in “Everytime You Leave,” hatched with Kurstin and Beck. “Candy and Her Friends” starts as bittersweet glam with psych-fuzz guitar, then drops in tempo and temperature to Lil Noid’s chilling rhyme.
When we were working with other people,” Auerbach says, “we were there to support their ideas, to do whatever we could to see that moment flourish.” He and Carney proudly note that Gallagher, who wrote Oasis’ biggest Britpop hits, had never co-written with members of another band before. But Ohio Players is not a supersession. It’s a Black Keys album, anchored in their fundamental chemistry and bond before with a twist. It’s “something that most bands twenty years into their career don’t make,” Carney says, “an approachable fun record that is also cool.”
Yet “it never feels like we’re sacrificing who we are,” Auerbach contends. In the final crunch of mixing and sequencing, “It was just Pat and me. Our relationship is tighter than it’s ever been.” And Ohio Players has “brought us closer together—in a really musical way.”
Ohio Players is The Black Keys’ fourth album in five years, a momentum with a simple explanation, Auerbach says: “We never stopped recording.” There was his and Carney’s reunion, after a five-year hiatus, on 2019’s “Let’s Rock”, then the 2021 blast of Mississippi-hill-country covers, Delta Kream. A rapid-fire follow-up of new originals, 2022’s Dropout Boogie, featured the duo working with outside writers for the first time: Greg Cartwright of Memphis rockers Reigning Sound and Angelo Petraglia, who has worked with Kings of Leon and the teenage Taylor Swift. (Cartwright and Petraglia are back for Ohio Players too.)
Carney estimates that, at one point, he and Auerbach had “something like fifty songs” underway for Ohio Players, many started “the traditional way—us jamming in the studio.” And there was “no slowing down,” Auerbach says, as the guests arrived. “Beck is so prolific—he’ll write a song one way, then go ‘I’ve got another idea’ and write something with a totally different melody.”
The Black Keys were in London in early 2023 combining work and pleasure—DJ gigs while Auerbach was promoting the Arcs’ second album, Electrophonic Chronic—when they wrote and recorded three songs, one a day, with Noel Gallagher at the hip, analog Toe Rag Studios. “When we were sitting around, talking about the people who write the big songs in the rock & roll world, he was one of those people,” Auerbach says. And there was prior history of a sort. In 2009, The Black Keys were invited to open a tour for Oasis. “But we were busy,” Carney remembers, “and they broke up anyway.”
At Toe Rag, Gallagher and The Black Keys got to work the old-fashioned way—sitting “in a circle with our instruments,” Auerbach says. “I had a vocal mic, Noel had a mic, Pat was on a drum kit and Leon was there with this weird, little ’60s-ish organ.” The Black Keys later nicknamed Gallagher “the Chord Lord. “He would sit there and cycle through chords,” Auerbach remembers. “He didn’t stop until he found the chord that worked with mine.” In fact, the versions of “On the Game,” “Only Love Matters,” and “You’ll Pay” on Ohio Players are all “live performances,” Auerbach declares, “us in the room, playing the songs until they were finished.”
Lil Noid and Juicy J, who appears on “Paper Crown,” joined the Ohio Players guest list late in the game—after being in heavy rotation between sessions. “Dan was playing a lot of Memphis rap from the ’90s that I’d never heard,” Carney says, a slow-rolling, lyrically graphic menace mostly limited to “these mixtapes not on any streaming service, uploaded to YouTube.”
Juicy J (real name Jordan Michael Huston III) was a founding member of Three 6 Mafia, who won an Academy Award for their song on the 2005 soundtrack, Hustle and Flow; Lil Noid (Derrick Harris) is best known for his 1995 tape, Paranoid Funk, a classic of the Memphis “horrorcore” genre and Auerbach’s favorite album from that scene. “We spent the whole year being amazed by this music,” Auerbach says. “That’s part of the reason we had Juicy J and Lil Noid on our record, to tell part of their story.”
“Candy and Her Friends” was “half a song,” Carney admits, “with a cool energy. We reached