In the past few years, whenever he hasn’t been busy selling out arenas with his band partner Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney,Dan Auerbach has booked informal jam sessions with a loose group of friends including Menahan Street Band saxophonist Leon Michels. “These guys are my oldest musical buddies besides Pat,” says the singer-guitarist. “We just record shit for fun and sock it away.” Near the end of last year, Auerbach and Michels combed through those tracks to assemble Yours, Dreamily releasedSeptember 4th, the debut of the band they dubbed the Arcs. Auerbach, says he’s looking forward to their first tour this fall: “With these guys, we can try absolutely anything. Honestly, I have no idea how it’s going to go, but I’m so excited.”
Dan Auerbach’s the Arcs have released “Lake Superior,” a new song inspired by the Netflix hit ‘Making a Murderer’
The Arcs were so disturbed by Netflix’s headline-making docu-series Making a Murderer that they wrote, recorded, mixed and mastered a psychedelic new track, “Lake Superior,” in two days. All proceeds from the song will benefit the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization – featured prominently in the show – that helps exonerate wrongly convicted people.
The lyrics are inspired by Making a Murderer’s central character, Steven Avery, who served 18 years in prison on a sexual assault conviction before being exonerated and released. Avery would later be arrested and convicted on unrelated murder charges. “On a stretch of sand, sweet northern breeze / Manitowoc put Avery on the beach,” DanAuerbach sings over woozy guitars and dissonant synths, “Your alibi, will never do / When the whole town’s got it out for you.”
The Arcs posted the track on Soundcloud, accompanied by a statement explaining their inspiration.
It’s like Billy Childish says, “We live in troubled times”. Last week, we got a sneak peek at what goes on behind the curtains of our criminal justice system. A few sleepless nights later we gathered in the studio and wrote this song. Written, recorded, mixed and mastered in 2 days. Since its December 18th release, Making a Murderer has become a cultural phenomenon.
As half of the guitar-and-drums duo The Black Keys, Dan Auerbach has explored, and repeatedly blown up, nearly every shade of the blues for more than a decade. The band’s raw early years in Akron, Ohio, were defined by ragged, high-octane bangers full of heavy riffs and explosive drumming. That gave way to an expansive, radio-polished sound that’s elevated Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney to the status of arena-filling rock stars, but the blues have still been threaded through every iterative step. Now, on the heels of The Black Keys’ 2014 album Turn Blue, Auerbach turns his attention to a different expression of the blues, with his new band The Arcs and yet another stylistic shift. On The Arc’s debut, Yours, Dreamily, it takes the form of immersive R&B and soul, built around buzzy guitars and funky grooves.
It’s not the first time Auerbach has stepped away from his main gig — he’s put out a solo record and produced albums for Dr. John and Lana Del Rey — but with The Arc’s, he assembles a complete creative collaboration. Written and recorded quickly between working on other projects together, Auerbach sought out many of his longtime friends: Leon Michels, Homer Steinweiss and Nick Movshon are all frequent members of the Daptone family, and have played with artists like Sharon Jones and Solange. Then there’s Richard Swift, a distinctive songwriter and producer who’s served as a touring utility player in The Black Keys and The Shins. With contributions from guitarist Kenny Vaughan, Mariachi Flor de Toloache (the New York all-female mariachi band) and Tchad Blake, Yours, Dreamily, captures the spontaneity of players in a room as they come up with something new in the moment.
Taken as a whole, Yours, Dreamily, is already one of Auerbach’s most ambitious and fully realized albums. But The Arcs’ formula is so winning and natural that the band already has, at least according to Auerbach, a backlog of as many as 75 songs. If even some of those come to fruition, it could prove to be an enduring, endlessly rewarding collaboration.
The video for “Put a Flower in Your Pocket,” the grimy new single from The Arcs, a new band featuring Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, Leon Michels, Richard Swift, Homer Steinweiss, and Nick Movshon. The single, which premiered today on Zane Lowe’s Beats1 radio program, comes from Yours, Dreamily, out September 4th on Nonesuch Records. Unsurprisingly, “Put a Flower in Your Pocket” is what we’ve come to expect from the likes of Auerbach and crew—dirty, bluesy soulful music with a reverbed, modern twist.
The video, which is animated, director Omar Juarez says: “My style is a combination of Chicano Art mixed with universal monsters, or more specifically the wolf man. The characters in the video are Rosie, the boxer, and the gangster. Rosie and the boxer are in their 20s and share equal interests in each other ever since they laid eyes on each other it was love at first sight. However, there is one big obstacle between them: Rosie’s boyfriend the gangster and his gangster lifestyle. After seeing her boyfriend cutting off the hand of the boxer for losing the biggest fight in his career, Rosie shot her boyfriend in retaliation and fled with the boxer. Unknowingly the gangster lived and came back to kill the boxer. Rosie being devastated took her own life to be with her love in the ghost world. GHOST LOVERS.”
The Arcs are Dan Auerbach, Leon Michels, Richard Swift, Homer Steinweiss, Nick Movshon, Kenny Vaughan, and Mariachi Flor de Toloache. The Second limited 7″ single includes the songs ‘Outta My Mind’ and non-album track ‘My Mind’. The Arcs collaboratively wrote and recorded 13 tracks for the forthcoming album ‘Yours, Dreamily’, with the musicians playing a large array of roles both vocally and instrumentally. Co-produced by Auerbach and Michels, the album was recorded in roughly two weeks through spontaneous, informal sessions across the country at the Sound Factory in Los Angeles, the Diamond Mine in Queens, Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound in Nashville, and in a lounge room at Electric Lady in Manhattan. Tchad Blake mixed the album on his horse farm in Wales.
Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys starts new solo project The Arcs. Inspired by the Floyd Mayweather / Manny Pacquiao boxing match, The Arcs release a limited 7″ with the songs ‘Stay in My Corner’ and ‘Tomato Can.’
The Fat Angel Sings 