Your Touch Sinister Kid Little Black Submarines The Black Keys

Your Touch Album: Magic Potion (2006)
Sinister Kid Album: Brothers (2010)
Little Black Submarines Album: El Camino (2011)
by The Black Keys

"Your Touch" is a single from The Black Keys' fourth album, Magic Potion.

Your Touch has been featured in the 2009 film Zombieland, HBO series Eastbound and Down, in a trailer for Battleship, and in the "Manic Monday" episode of the HBO series Entourage. It was also used in the 2010 video game Major League Baseball 2K10 as well as in the 2011 video game Driver: San Francisco.

The Your Touch music video, directed by Peter Zavadil, features the band playing on the old W Falor St bridge in front of the former Goodrich rubber factory in Akron, Ohio, where they are shot dead while playing. A boy comes over (played by their manager's stepson, Gavin Smith), and a hand from the bass drum hands him a fabergé egg similar to the one on the cover of the album the song was taken from. When the boy leaves, the ghosts of Dan and Patrick get up and walk away to a diner, where small bits of diegetic dialogue between members of the band's ghosts interrupts the music ("So what do you think about being dead?" "...I don't know, my neck hurts." "At least I died doing what I love. Lip-syncing. I love that shit"). The boy is then shown going around showing people the egg. One of the characters shown the egg is played by regional actress, Jovana Batkovic. Jovana Batkovic would later become the frontwoman for the Cleveland-based band HotChaCha. When the people he meets see the egg, they throw up a chicken egg and die. The boy consults a welder to destroy the egg, but it cannot be destroyed. Later, the members of the band's ghosts comes back to inhabit their dead bodies, which then get up and explode, dying once again. Carney is seen catching Auerbach as they die, screaming "no!"

Your Touch was covered by Donnie Iris, and it was the only studio recording on his 2009 album Ah! Live!

Vocalist/guitarist Dan Auerbach told The Sun May 14, 2010 Sinister Kid: "It's about feeling like an outcast, a person who lives in the shadows with regret and fear. Living every day like you could be going straight to hell at any moment. Fun stuff!"

Sinister Kid was one of 10 songs the band recorded in Sheffield, Alabama at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, where the band had to rough it to record. The studio was beat up and hub of activity in the area was Walmart, so they spent a lot of time experimenting with the vintage gear their producer Mark Neill brought down from this collection. Neill discussed the recording of this song in a track-by-track on The Black Keys Fan Lounge: "I'm playing on one speaker and Dan's on the other. I'm playing the skank part, the scrapes, that's the Rickenbacker. Dan's playing on the other side on the Harmony, which is great – he's playing all the lead and all that stuff. Dan's lead playing is really good on this record by the way. I only fill in little different pieces generally, stuff that was missing. This has me playing all the way through it. He plays through my amps so it's very easy to match the tone where required to fill in. Dan and I do not necessarily play with a pick. We did everything very quickly. When I got home this record was not finished. Anything I added was done with taste and great care to make it invisible." (Here's more on the Muscle Shoals sound and Black Keys visit.

Sinister Kid features backing vocals from American R&B and hip hop singer Nicole Wray, a former Missy Elliott protége who had a #5 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1998 with "Make it Hot." She also features on "Everlasting Light," and according to co-producer Mark Neill, "I'm Not The One."

The Black Keys duo of Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney recorded Little Black Submarines with producer Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton in a number of different ways before settling on the version that can be heard on the El Camino album. "'Little Black Submarines' began as a demo that Brian and Dan made," Carney recalled to American Songwriter magazine, "but we completely changed the song around. We cut it four or five different ways, then we cut a really stripped-down version with acoustic guitar. We had a louder version, too, but it wasn't completely working, so we decided to combine the two by going into the studio and punching in a new ending. That whole ending is the first take we played, just figuring out what we're doing and riffing on that idea. That's why that part of the album feels the loosest. It's how Dan and I play. It's live in the studio, just guitar and drums, with the instruments bleeding into reach other."

The Danny Clinch-shot video shows the Black Keys performing at Nashville's Springwater Supper Club bar. The clip came about after the original story-based idea fell through. Auerbach told Rolling Stone: "We all just sort of kind of mutually agreed that it should probably just be the performance and not any of the other extra stuff. Luckily we had live footage so we turned it into a live video. We just sort of said 'You know, it was fun kind of performing here at a small club with the fans. Why don't we just have it be that?"

The Springwater Supper Club venue is a former speakeasy. "It's a really cool building," Auerbach said to Rolling Stone: "It's been there forever. It's got a lot of history. It's one of three or four different little small dive bars in town. It's special because it's so old."