Keep It Hid

Dan Auerbach’s debut solo album, Keep It Hid, returns to physical formats, with the seminal 2009 collection being reissued on vinyl, cassette, and CD via Easy Eye Sound – the label that Keep It Hid first inspired him to create. The fourteen-song debut marked Auerbach’s first major work outside of The Black Keys, helping to establish his multifaceted career as a Grammy-winning producer, mentor to emerging talent, and founder of Easy Eye Sound, which is now Billboard’s reigning Blues Label Of The Year. Keep It Hid was originally recorded by Auerbach as he was building his first home studio in Akron, Ohio – a precursor to his Easy Eye Sound Studio in Nashville, where Auerbach now records and produces most of the label’s current releases. Inspired by trips to many of his all-time favorite rooms – from Suma Recording in Cleveland to Robin Hood in Texas to Toe Rag in London – Auerbach discovered a passion for studio work that remains at the center of his musical world nearly fifteen years on. Also tapping into his love of record-collecting and crate-digging more than ever before, Keep It Hid was inspired by forgotten 60s psych rock, obscure British power-pop, bluegrass family bands, and even the lyricism of his own father, Chuck Auerbach (Dan would go on to produce Chuck’s debut album, Remember Me, in 2018). Another major influence was Dr. John’s acid-voodoo classic Gris-Gris, one of Auerbach’s heroes that he would go on to produce just a few years later. The resulting collection spans from echo-laden garage rock (“Heartbroken, In Disrepair”) and fuzz-scarred blues (“The Prowl”) to haunted Southern soul (“Real Desire”) and bittersweet-country comfort (“When The Night Comes”). The album was hailed as “intimate and thrilling” by NPR’s Fresh Air upon its original release, with reviewer Ken Tucker adding it “sounds like a clearing of the throat and mind.”