THE BLACK KEYS With Cage the Elephant When: Monday at 7 p.m. Where: Deer Lake Park (Burnaby) Tickets are sold out Canada loves The Black Keys. In fact, the Great White North was the first spot on the globe where the Akron, Ohio-bred blues-rock duo earned gold record status, something they proudly announced at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver last year during the first round of touring for their triple Grammy-winning album Brothers (Best Alternative Music Album, Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals for single Tighten Up, and Best Recording Package). Brothers has since gone platinum up here, and it also earned drummer Patrick Carney and guitarist/vocalist Dan Auerbach a performance slot during this month’s MuchMusic Video Awards in Toronto, where the band mingled with the likes of Bieber, Gaga and other pop sensations. The day after the MMVAs, Carney was riding in a car on the way to a hockey rink in suburban Toronto, where The Black Keys were meant to start rehearsing for their first full-blown Canadian tour. The trek will take them all the way from Vancouver to the East Coast. “I’m looking forward to seeing Saskatoon,” Carney said with a chuckle via cellphone, adding that the band never really rehearses but that the post-Grammy Black Keys concert setup involves, for the first time, the band’s own sound production and lighting design that needs to be tested before they hit the road. Things certainly have changed for Carney and Auerbach over the past 12 months, even more so than in the past 10 years they have spent working together. “Dan and I have never really pursued trying to be really popular,” Carney said. “We haven’t specifically sought it out. But when we put this record out, we said yes to most of the things offered to us — radio performances and things like that. We didn’t want to not do stuff that might actually help the record do well. So it’s the first time we ever actively promoted an album.” Singles and outtakes from Brothers quickly found their way into commercials and soundtracks (most notably song Chop and Change making it onto the soundtrack for emo vampire blockbuster The Twilight Saga: Eclipse), culminating with the video for Howlin’ For You gathering a plethora of celebrities including model and Battlestar Galactica star Tricia Helfer, actor Sean Patrick Flanery and snowboarding icon Shaun White. FROM LO-FI TO HI-FI The Black Keys have come a long way from their lo-fi, garage-bred origins, encapsulated in the 2002 debut The Big Come Up, 2003’s thickfreakness, 2004’s Rubber Factory and 2006’s Magic Potion. The band’s biggest reinvention came in the form of 2008’s Danger Mouse-produced Attack & Release, which saw the band’s soulful take on blues-rock mingling with Brian Burton’s signature loop-laden, modern style. With Brothers — recorded in just 10 days following a rough patch that included Carney’s divorce to his first wife in 2009 (he is now engaged to girlfriend Emily Ward), Auerbach releasing solo album Keep It Hid and Carney forming his own band Drummer — the duo rekindled the down-home spirit that had made The Black Keys so special all along.

Ironically, as the band gets older and its fame grows, it seems to be attracting a younger audience and moving away from the indie cult following it had nurtured in its early days. “Yeah, I mean, our career path is bizarre, I guess,” Carney said. “When we started out we were just excited to be making music and able to go on tour and stuff. And it’s something we’re still excited to do. I think we’re making better records now than we ever have. A lot of times, indie bands aren’t given the time to mature as musicians. And also a lot of times bands are jinxed by the fact that it’s hard for four guys to get along for 10 years. “(The time before Brothers) wasn’t even really a rough patch as much as it was just standard, normal life s---,” he added. “Dan and I get along really well. There are times when we hate each other but that usually lasts about five minutes. It’s no different than me and most of my friends. When you spend 150 days a year in the same vicinity as somebody, you’re going to be comfortable enough to get angry with them.” However, Carney admitted, the band’s sudden burst of popularity and its eventual Grammy coronation in February did give him the heebie-jeebies, if only temporarily. “As the record started doing better and better, it kinda freaked me out for a few months, honestly,” Carney said. “Starting last August all the way up to the Grammys, I was a little bit scared. We’d been doing it for so long we were in a comfort zone. And then, all of sudden — six records into it — we became a band that was pretty popular for the first time. “The weird thing is, we went to the Grammy Awards and I realized it all isn’t that big of a deal, basically, and there’s no reason to be stressed out. At the end of the day, people will always be more excited about (MTV show Jersey Shore’s) The Situation or Snooki than they are about our band. So there’s not that much pressure. I went to the Grammys and saw these idiots swarmed by the press and realized that we’ll always be able to hide behind Snooki if we need to.” BLACK TO THE FUTURE The followup to Brothers is on its way. The new album is being mixed by Tchad Blake (who also mixed Brothers), which Carney said is taking a couple weeks longer than it normally would. The recording sessions admittedly also took longer than the short 10-day stretch during which the band hammered out close to 20 songs in 2009, something Carney blames on working in Auerbach’s new studio in their new hometown of Nashville. “We’re hoping (the album) comes out later this year,” Carney said. “Working in Nashville is cool. It’s a great city. Dan’s studio is amazing as well. But it took us a little bit longer to make this record than it did to make Brothers and that’s partly because we made it in the town we’re living in. We knew going into making this record that it’s not a good idea to do that because you can get distracted easily, but we’d been travelling so much we needed to be home.”