Good Love

Album: Dropout Boogie (2022)
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Songfacts®:

  • Both Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney are huge ZZ Top fans, even citing the band as the inspiration for their "Wild Child" video. So when they got wind that ZZ Top frontman Billy Gibbons was in Nashville, they invited him to Easy Eye studio.

    "I heard Billy was in town, so I texted him to see if he fancied dropping by the studio if he had any free time," Auerbach told The Sun. "I told him Pat and I were recording and that he should come and hang out. And he f---ing did!"

    The Black Keys and Gibbons jammed for an hour and a half nonstop. One song that came out of their improvisations was "Good Love."
  • Gibbons showed up at the Black Keys' studio with a bottle of red wine but without a guitar. His visit turned into an epic jam session after Gibbons spotted a guitar that used to be owned by one of Auerbach's hill-country heroes, Mississippi Fred McDowell. It was a Gibson Trini Lopez with little jewels all over it glued by McDowell's wife.

    "And so I handed it to him, we plugged it straight into the amp, turned the amp all the way up and it was boom, it was Billy Gibbons," Auerbach told Apple Music. "And when he finished the bottle of red wine, he took off. And we had four songs finished by the time he left."
  • The song has a simple premise of how a good love is hard to find. The Black Keys' records are more about the groove than the lyrics. Their words are merely a skeleton to hang their bluesy rock music over.
  • The Black Keys recorded "Good Love" for their 11th studio album, Dropout Boogie. It is one of several tracks, also including "Burn the Damn Thing Down" and "Didn't I Love You," that are first takes, with imperfections left in. "We wanted [the songs] to flow almost subconsciously, to just be fun - kind of how half of them came to us," Auerbach told Billboard.

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