Next Girl

This track is from Brothers, the sixth album by American blues-rock duo, The Black Keys. The band comprises vocalist/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer/producer Patrick Carney.

Mark Neill, who co-produced/engineered the record with Auerbach and Carney, told The Black Keys Fan Lounge about this song: "Next Girl is a classic soul sound. The feature of this song is the melody. The song vaguely mirrors Pat's experiences with his divorce, which both Dan and Pat were feeling sympathetically. It was pretty heavy, a really amazing moment, where when you hear the sound come out of the speakers you go 'Is that me, is that you?' It was one of those moments when you don't even recognize anybody in the room is involved in it."

Patrick Carney was in a really bad place, in the tail end of a crumbling relationship. The story goes that Dan Auerbach wrote this tune for Carney to acknowledge the fact that he knew what his partner was going through with the divorce. "Oh I wrote that song before," Auerbach told Mojo magazine: "It wasn't about him. I wrote that song a year and a half before we recorded Brothers, around the time I was working on the solo record stuff. It just happened to be the first song we recorded for Brothers."

He admitted that hearing the song was a special moment for Carney. "I just saw it in his eyes," he told Mojo. "Pat's just playing along, we get all the instrumentation done, then he goes out to smoke. Then I put the vocals on and he comes back in to finally hear the song. And… His eyes lit up and he gave me a big hug. It was weird. I didn't plan it like that. It just worked. It was just destiny."