It took the light forever to get to your eyes

When Miles Kane walked into Easy Eye Sound for the first time in June 2024, he found two acoustic guitars and two notepads waiting at the Nashville studio's kitchen table. The British singer-songwriter was an established artist in the UK with five Top 20 albums of pocket-dynamite pop and psychedelic groove as well as two U.K. Number One LPs as half of The Last Shadow Puppets with Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner. But Kane was rolling new dice here, a songwriting session with someone he had never met before: Easy Eye Sound founder and The Black Keys singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach.

Kane was "a fan boy," he admits. "I love the Keys. And I love Dan's solo albums," citing songs like "The Prowl" on 2009's Keep It Hid and "King Of A One-Horse Town" on 2017's Waiting On A Song. Auerbach says he only knew Kane "was 'the man' over in England, buddies with Alex." Yet Kane and Auerbach immediately bonded over mutual obsessions: power-chord pioneer Link Wray; the deep-cut corners of American soul and '60s British-pop history; the rippled frenzy of tremolo guitar, triggered with a Bigsby whammy bar. By the end of their first day together, the two strangers had written three perfect knockouts, joined at the table by Pat McLaughlin, a Nashville composer-producer invited by Auerbach.

All three songs are now on Sunlight In The Shadows – Kane's turning-point debut for the Easy Eye Sound label, produced by Auerbach and the hottest roots-and-raveup party you've had on your Victrola in many moons. "Sunlight In The Shadows" is the language of the Delta with a midnight-city tension.

"Everyone was like, 'Wow, there's a feeling here,'" Kane raves at a supersonic clip. He recalls "humming this surf-guitar riff" at one point as he and Auerbach were "both hitting an invisible whammy bar on our acoustics. I was like, 'God, this guy is like me. He gets it!'"

To Auerbach, Kane was "larger than life," a rock & roll zealot with mod-avenger cool. "I felt like I'm hanging out with a rock star," Auerbach says, laughing. "I wanted to make a record as raw and in your face as he is. But sexy too, with depth. I wanted to give Miles his Scott Walker moment," referring to the shadows and majesty on that singer's fabled '60s solo albums. "I didn't want to ignore that. It's a big part of who Miles is."

The result is an album that evokes the atomic transcendence of British-beat bands like The Who, The Move and The Action, the way they turned the lessons and inspirations on their favorite Atlantic and Chess singles into original guitar-and-vocal fire. "Dan and I love all that," Kane exclaims, "mixing T. Rex, Motown and The Easybeats. When we were chatting and sharing references, we were so similar in taste it was frightening."

Sunlight In The Shadows is also alive with the sound of the instant friendship born in that kitchen. Kane and Auerbach wrote the album's eleven original songs with contributions from McLaughlin, Daniel Tashian and The Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney. Auerbach sings backing vocals and plays on every track, part of the record's guitar army with Easy Eye regular Tom Bukovac, guitarist Nick Bockrath of Cage The Elephant and Barrie Cadogan from British garage futurists Little Barrie.

"Never enough guitars," Auerbach cracks. "We had a whole mess of guitar players doing the most simple, interlocking parts, like a locomotive slowly getting going." Malcolm Catto – "A monster U.K. guy, one of the greatest beat drummers alive right now" – kept it all on the rails. The recording sessions which followed six months after that songwriting explosion took only three days. Kane, Auerbach and the band cut nearly everything in live takes, usually in the first or second pass – Kane's vocals included. "Before going into the sessions," Kane says, "I was touring the U.K.. I would sing these songs every day, between shows, so when we were doing them with the band, I wasn't thinking, 'What's the melody or lyric here?' Recording the album was like fight night," he notes. "But what you do in fight camp is just as important."

Sunlight In The Shadows was recorded so quickly that, with studio time left over on the final day, Auerbach suggested doing a cover: "Slow Death," a 1972 nugget by the Flamin' Groovies, slowing it down a hair and pumping up the swagger as if New Orleans funk master Allen Toussaint had produced it for Slade. Kane didn't know the song. Even so, "An hour later," he says brightly, "we laid it down."

"I don't know what it was," Auerbach says. "Miles and I got in the studio and it just made sense, right from the very jump." He points out that when Kane took a copy of Sunlight In The Shadows back to Britain after the sessions, "The first thing he did was play it for his mom, because he was so excited about it. That's the ultimate, man."

"All roads, over 20 years, have led here," Kane says of Sunlight In The Shadows. Born in The Wirral, across the River Mersey from Liverpool, he was 18 when he joined his first band, The Little Flames in 2004, touring with Arctic Monkeys and The Coral (whose founding members include Kane's cousins James and Ian Skelly). Kane stepped forward in his next band, becoming the singer, lead guitarist and main writer of The Rascals. Another tour with Arctic Monkeys led to Kane and Turner working on song ideas backstage, then at a studio in France where they made The Last Shadow Puppets' 2008 debut, The Age of the Understatement, in two weeks.

Kane says that "when me and Alex were doing the first Puppets album, we'd go to each other's mum's house, sit in the bedroom and there'd be acoustics and notepads. The way it was set up in that kitchen, at Easy Eye, it took me back to that place, how it all started."

Auerbach made sure the guitars were up to the challenge, The explosive break in the middle of "Blue Skies" – a bolt of vicious string-bending and feedback harmonics – is played by Bukovac, a longtime running buddy of Auerbach and The Black Keys, originally from Cleveland. "I had that one opening on that song," Auerbach explains. "I was like, 'Tom, I need you. Come represent for Ohio.' That solo is all Northeast Ohio."

"This record was incredible to make," Auerbach declares, "from start to finish. I felt like I gained a life-long friend in Miles. And that doesn't always happen. When it does, it's amazing. This is an artist who could potentially make records forever."