Lake Street Dive

Lake Street Dive has such a multigenred sound that one of their albums hit #1 on three very different Billboard charts: Folk Albums, Top Alternative Albums and Top Rock Albums. Given that, it’s no surprise that the group has appeared at events as diverse as the Toronto Jazz Fest, the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, the Underground Music Showcase, the Newport Folk Festival, the Roots N Blues N BBQ Festival, Central Park SummerStage, AmericanaFest, the Green River Festival and SXSW.

When they’re not barnstorming the festival circuit or in a recording studio, they’re usually playing for the thousands of fans they’ve made over the past 20-plus years across the US, Canada, the UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. And that relentless schedule is part of the band’s creative process, according to multi-instrumentalist Mike Olson, who spearheaded formation of the band. “Nothing we do is set in stone,” he told Laurel Canyon Music in 2013, noting that the group has always been a live outfit first and foremost. “Songs change when we start to play them for people. That determines the stylistic direction more than anything else. When we record a song, that’s just a snapshot of where it was at that moment and it continues to grow as we perform it.”

Though based in Brooklyn these days, Lake Street Dive is nearly as rooted in Boston as bands formed by native Bostonians since the group came together in 2004 at New England Conservatory, where all the original members were enrolled at the time, and cut its teeth gigging at area venues including Scullers Jazz Club, The Lizard Lounge and Club Passim. Now an international act with an audience stretching from New England to New South Wales, the group’s material is an acoustical amalgam of pop, rock, soul, jazz, Latin, folk and funk, with socially conscious lyrics often interwoven, and they’ve received effusive praise from critics for their in-studio originality and on-stage energy. The band has recorded eight studio albums, three EPs and one live disc.

LINEUP, BAND NAME, INFLUENCES

Olson, a Minneapolis native who plays trumpet, guitar, electric piano, organ and synthesizer (and acquired the nickname “McDuck” during his time at the conservatory because of his reclusive nature), hand-picked the other members of the band’s original lineup. Vocalist Rachael Price, daughter of composer-conductor Tom Price, was born in Australia but raised near Nashville; bassist Bridget Kearney is from Iowa City, Iowa; and drummer Mike Calabrese grew up in a Philadelphia suburb. “I wasn’t only impressed with their musicianship,” Olson told the webzine The Vogue in 2025. “They were also a lot of fun just to hang out with. The first four years of rehearsals were more like glorified dinner parties.” Keyboardist-singer-songwriter Akie Bermiss, a Brooklynite, joined the group in 2017, making Lake Street Dive a quintet, and guitarist-vocalist James Cornelison, a Chicagoan, joined in mid-2021 after Olson left the group.

Olsen named the band after Lake Street in Minneapolis, a location famous for its many dive bars and Bryant-Lake Bowl & Theatre, a bowling alley, restaurant and bar that houses a 90-seat performance space and hosts an eclectic array of entertainment, including the annual Minnesota Fringe Festival. Though he initially assembled the group to be what he’s called a “free country band,” intending to play country music in a largely improvised, avant-garde style, he changed his mind soon after the band came together since he wanted to craft something that “actually sounded good,” he told American Blues Scene in 2016.

In terms of influences, each band member had been singing and/or playing instruments since elementary school, some had classic training while growing up and their personal preferences ranged from traditional jazz and classic pop to ‘50s rock, The Beatles and other British Invasion acts, Motown and chart-topping ‘70s groups like Fleetwood Mac and ABBA. “We want it to sound like The Beatles and Motown had a party together,” Calabrese told Emma John of The Observer in 2014.

EARLY YEARS, FIRST ALBUMS

Combining their shared influences into an arty, undefinable musical mélange, the members of Lake Street Dive juggled the band’s tours with other musical commitments during most of the group’s first decade, during which time the band appeared at venues all over the US. Kearney played with Joy Kills Sorrow in addition to Lake Street Dive until 2012, Calabrese did the same with Girls, Guns, and Glory and vocalist Price (who recorded her first solo album a year before Lake Street Dive formed) was signed to her father’s jazz label, Claire Vision, until 2013, when the band bought out the remainder of her contract.

Lake Street Dive’s recording days began after Kearney won in the Jazz Category of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest in 2005 for the band’s performance of her song “Sometimes When I’m Drunk and You’re Wearing My Favorite Shirt.” Using the prize ($1,000 cash and 1,000 CDs produced by Disc Makers), they cut their debut album, In This Episode…, in 2006; FYO Records released it in January 2007 and issued the band’s second LP, Promises, Promises, in October 2008.

In 2010, the group signed with Northampton, Massachusetts-based Signature Sounds Recordings and recorded an eponymous, 14-track album at Basement 247 Studios in Boston’s Allston neighborhood, issued in November that year. They refer to the label’s president, Jim Olsen, as “Lake Street Dive’s dad,” Olsen told Billy Rosenbeck of Elmore magazine in 2014, “because of all the support he gave us when we were so infantile.” In 2011, Signature released the group’s one and only live album/concert video, Live at the Lizard Lounge, which they’d recorded in 2010, and the band spent much of that year gigging across North America, including a December show at Northampton’s Iron Horse Music Hall.

“I WANT YOU BACK” VIDEO, FUN MACHINE, NATIONAL BREAKTHROUGH

The band’s major national breakthrough came suddenly in May 2012 when a recording of their slow, soulful cover of The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” – filmed on a streetcorner in Boston’s Brighton neighborhood – got a million views within days after an anonymous fan posted it on Reddit. The video, which has since been viewed over six million times, prompted actor Kevin Bacon to tweet about the group, which led to producer T Bone Burnett offering them a spot alongside Elvis Costello and others at a show in New York City in September 2013 to celebrate the film Inside Llewyn Davis. “The internet is a rocket ship to fame,” Price told The Observer in 2014. “Perhaps it’s more like time travel.”

In November 2012, six months after their take on “I Want You Back” went viral, Signature released the band’s first EP, Fun Machine, which reached #15 in Billboard’s Top Heat Seekers chart. Along with “I Want You Back,” the six-song disc includes covers of George Michaels’s 1987 hit “Faith,” Hall & Oates’s 1977 classic “Rich Girl,” the Pomus-Shuman-penned “This Magic Moment,” Paul and Linda McCartney’s “Let Me Roll It” from 1973’s Band on the Run LP and “Clear a Space,” credited to Price and her father. Since 2013, the band has posted an annual “Halloween Collection” on YouTube featuring their renditions of tracks by Queen, ABBA, The Mamas and the Papas, The Drifters, The Kinks and The B-52’s, among others.

By early 2013, Lake Street Dive had gone from playing dive bars and tiny clubs for several dozen fans to selling out multi-thousand-seat halls and appearing on TV shows including The Colbert Report, The Late Show with David Letterman, Conan and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. At the end of the year, they embarked on their first UK/Europe tour, which included concerts in Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin and London, followed by ones in Belgium, Sweden and other countries in early 2014

BAD SELF PORTRAITS, NONESUCH ALBUMS

In February 2014, Signature released Lake Street Dive’s second LP for the label, Bad Self Portraits. A collection of 11 originals, it peaked at #18 in the Billboard 200 but went all the way to #5 in Billboard’s Top Rock Albums chart. AllMusic’s Matt Collar said the album represented the group’s successful transition from being perceived as something of a novelty act to being seen as a formidable creative presence. “Rather than revisit [Fun Machine’s] neat gimmick of a jazz-soul band covering contemporary pop songs, Lake Street Dive instead delve into a substantial batch of their own blue-eyed-soul and Southern rock-inflected originals,” he wrote.

After spending most of 2014 and 2015 on the road – including a September 2014 appearance at the Boston Calling Music Festival and their first tour of Australia and New Zealand in early 2015 – the band signed with Nonesuch Records. Teaming with producer Dave Cobb (John Prine, Lady Gaga), they recorded Side Pony in Nashville and the label released it in February 2016. Named after Kearney’s preferred hairstyle, the album stalled at #29 in the Billboard 200 but topped Billboard’s Folk Albums, Top Alternative Albums and Top Rock Albums charts. To support the disc, band toured North America and Europe, including an October 2016 gig at the Wang Theatre in Boston (now part of Boch Center). In January 2017, Lake Street Dive debuted in Japan with a two-night stand at Blue Note Tokyo.

In May 2018, Nonesuch issued the band’s second LP for the label, Free Yourself Up, which went to #8 in the Billboard 200 and #2 in the Top Rock Albums chart, and in November 2018 the label released the group’s second EP, Freak Yourself Out. Also in 2018, Lake Street Dive was nominated for an Emmy Award for the theme they wrote and performed for the Netflix series Somebody Feed Phil. In 2021, the band recorded the 11-track album Obviously, produced by Mike Elizondo (Sheryl Crow, Eminem, Fiona Apple) and released in March of that year, which peaked at #63 in the Billboard 200 but made it to #3 in Billboard’s Top Tastemakers Albums and Folk Albums charts, #6 in the Top Alternative Albums chart and #7 in the Top Rock Albums chart.

FUN MACHINE: THE SEQUEL, GOOD TOGETHER, “ALWAYS A DIVE-BAR BAND”

In September 2022, Fantasy Records and Concord Music Group released Lake Street Dive’s third EP, Fun Machine: The Sequel, which is precisely what the title indicates. The disc includes renditions The Pointer Sisters’ “Automatic,” Bonnie Raitt’s “Nick of Time, Bacharach-David’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One,” The Cranberries “Linger” and Carole King’s “So Far Away.” The band’s latest LP is Good Together, which Elizondo produced and the band released on its own label, Lake Street Dive Music, in June 2024.

Asked in 2013 how he and others were dealing with their sudden international success, Calabrese said nobody in the band had forgotten their humble roots and all the years they spent gigging at hole-in-the-wall joints. “We are named in homage to dive-bar bands,” he told Laurel Canyon Music. “We were, are and always will be a dive-bar band. Whether we’re playing for 10 people or 10,000, we want them to have that feeling.” In December 2024, Lake Street Dive played two sold-out shows at Boston’s 5,000-seat MGM Music Hall at Fenway, proving how popular they remain in the city that they can rightfully call their musical hometown.

(by D.S. Monahan)