To play any cover of any song requires both humility and immense confidence: the kind of precision and restraint that honors the music while building on its legacy. And he’s talking about coming home, Down South where it’s not chilly like Chicago.” At Easy Eye, I heard traces of both versions - the groove that Garry Burnside mentioned, and that sense of lyrical movement, words spilling into one another for short runs before vanishing again, letting the instrumentation take over. You can add anything in that sliding groove you get. “You stay in that groove, and you can do anything you want. “Well, it’s got such a funky groove,” he said. Garry Burnside, R.L.’s son, told me over the phone that this was one of his favorites of his father’s songs and spoke of the variation in how it has been played over the years. There’s another version of the song, from Burnside’s 1994 album, “Too Bad Jim,” which is fuller - more instrumentation, more pace. There are only a few lyrics, and they drone together through their repetition: “you’llbemybabeeeeyoullbemybabeyoullbemybabeeeeeyoullbemybabe.” And then, slower: “I’ll do anything ya say.” In the documentary “You See Me Laughin’,” Burnside plays an early-’70s version of “Goin’ Down South.” His grin is devilish, and he looks at the crowd as if he knows something they don’t. These songs were the work of studied musicians who understand how the blues has transformed through time, through varied voices and eras. Auerbach and Carney, for all of their admiration of Junior Kimbrough, never got to meet him before he died in 1998. Kenney Brown, gray-haired and lanky, quietly tinkered on his guitar - a beautiful old black machine that he later told me has been stolen twice. Carney wiggled his 6-foot-4 frame behind a compact drum set, a small logistical feat. They seemed to settle into the reality that they were about to play music for an audience, albeit an audience of one, something that took on an almost holy tone a year into the pandemic. He invited me into the studio’s central room, to take a seat on a bench around a circle where the musicians were warming up. On a door to the left of the studio’s front entrance hangs a faded orange pennant that reads: AKRON, OHIO, the city where Auerbach and Carney were born and raised.Īuerbach, who is 42, had the now-familiar pandemic-era look of someone who has gone without a cut and a shave for a while, but he wore it with easy nonchalance. Records line the top shelves along the walls and stretch far, including ones that Auerbach produced by blues legends like Jimmy (Duck) Holmes, established artists like Lana Del Rey, and up-and-coming ones like Marcus King and Yola, whose singing Auerbach couldn’t stop raving about. There’s massive old equipment, a solid-state mixing board, an old drum from an Ohio fire department, historic guitars, like Mississippi Fred MacDowell’s red Trini Lopez. But inside it’s eccentric, a kind of museum. In 10 hours, over two days, the group made what became their latest album, “Delta Kream,” which consists entirely of Delta and Mississippi Hill Country blues covers.įrom the outside, Easy Eye is a nondescript building on a street that looks like one you may have seen in your town: gas stations, chain stores, one hectic intersection tying it all together. When the songs seemed as if they were becoming something greater, Auerbach called Carney and told him he had to get to the studio. Burnside (Deaton and Brown had known and made music with them both). He wanted to play the music that captivated him as a teenager and initially connected him and his bandmate, Patrick Carney: the Mississippi blues.Īuerbach invited the blues players Kenny Brown and Eric Deaton to come up from northern Mississippi to work on a Robert Finley album that he was producing, “Sharecropper’s Son.” After the sessions, the three of them sat in the snug center room at Easy Eye and jammed on some songs by the Delta bluesmen Junior Kimbrough and R.L. So Dan Auerbach, the band’s singer, whose voice has a distinctive pathos, retreated back to Easy Eye Sound, his Nashville studio. But in the small window after the tour and before the pandemic gripped the United States, they were eager to ground themselves in something more intimate, more familiar. The duo were reinvigorated by their hiatus, playing live shows with the kind of frenetic energy that had become their trademark.
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