Singer Rachael Price and drummer Mike Calabrese of Lake Street Dive are in Cleveland, Ohio, hours before their band’s show at the TempleLive Cleveland Masonic, a 2,200-seat theater known for its Romanesque Revival style and its renowned acoustics. It’s a far cry from the dive bars where they cut their teeth 20 years ago.
“We learned how to be a band by playing these dive bars mostly around Boston and [playing] these three-hour sets,” Price tells me over Zoom, sitting next to Calabrese in a nondescript room at the venue. “It was songs with repeated choruses, backbeats, anything with background vocals, anything people could sing along to by the end of the song, even if they didn’t know it.”
Lake Street Dive formed in 2004 at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music by Mike Olson—who has since retired from the band—with Price, Calabrese, and bassist Bridget Kearney. Their name is inspired by Bryant Lake Bowl, a frequent hangout on Lake Street in Minneapolis. The group originally planned to play avant-garde honky-tonk.
“To this day we don’t quite know what that actually sounds like because we tried it for maybe just that one rehearsal and then gave up because it didn’t sound very good,” says Calabrese.
The band’s sound was hard to define back then, and it’s still difficult to put any sort of genre label on it now. Together with keyboardist Akie Bermiss and guitarist James Cornelison, Lake Street Dive is best described as a cross-pollination of soul, folk, jazz, and classic pop. Amid a summer tour supporting their eighth LP, Good Together—released in June—Price and Calabrese believe the band’s heart is in their dive-bar roots, that small, intimate live-show connection with its audience, no matter the venue—from beer-soaked roadhouses with pool-and-dart-playing audiences like the Chicken Box in Nantucket, to the prestigious Madison Square Garden, where the band will play on September 14.
“We really figured out our sound through an audience giving us back that energy. And then we would take that in and write songs that we were like, ‘Oh, this is going to work really well live,” says Price. “And I think even now, if I’m writing a Lake Street dive song, it’s already in my head of where it would be in the show. We’re very oriented towards a live party.”
Over the past 20 years, Lake Street Dive has built a loyal fan following through relentless touring. They’ve also become known for their Halloween cover song series on YouTube, including an endearing cover of A-ha’s “Take On Me.”
Thanks to a bluesy 2012 version of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” the band’s reach dramatically grew. It didn’t hurt that Kevin Bacon tweeted about it, either. “That was a hugely helpful thing for us, obviously with this video,” Price tells me. “I remember not understanding anything about Twitter at the time when it happened. I was like, ‘People are retweeting the tweet! Like, what does this even mean?’” During that time, Twitter had only been around for six years and going viral on social media was a much more organic affair than it is now. Price remembers watching the band’s Facebook following get bigger and bigger, not completely understanding what was happening. All they knew was that their shows started selling out and fans would come to watch them play already knowing their lyrics, which Price thought was crazy at the time. As of this writing, the video sits at 7,702,243 views.
Part of Lake Street Dive’s wide appeal is that they defy genre. And that creative freedom comes largely from the group’s collective love of the Beatles. “The Beatles were the gold standard for elevated pop music,” he says. “If you want to learn how to write hooks, you can go to the Beatles. If you want to learn how to write sad songs, happy songs, or songs that could be children’s songs, but are still awesome, you go to the Beatles. If you want to learn odd time signatures, you can go to the Beatles. If you want to know how to arrange strings or arrange a band of just five people and make it sound huge, you go to the Beatles. They did it all.”
Price adds, “Our songs don’t really fit a specific genre, and they never will because we all write the songs and we don’t all write the same kind of music. So we need a band like the Beatles to look to, to understand how you can have a cohesive sound without having a specific genre that you play.”
Lake Street Dive employed that spirit of community songwriting on their new album, inspired loosely by Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Early last year, the band met up at Calabrese’s home in Vermont and spent a week together writing new songs. As a way to organize the intricacies of songwriting collaboration, the band used a 20-sided die owned by Berniss, a Dungeonmaster who, together with Kearney, conducted D&D campaigns over Zoom during the pandemic. Each band member would roll the die and assign the numbers to values that corresponded to the chords, meter, and tempo for each song. Then each member would present, record, and loop it, then go away for 30 minutes to write lyrics and a melody to accompany it. Calabrese shows me his hat—a white baseball cap with a 20-sided die emblazoned in red on the front, now officially part of the band’s merch.
While only three of those songs they wrote that day made the record—“Good Together,” “Far Gone,” and “Walking Uphill”—they still consider the experiment a success, a testament to the creative camaraderie they’ve shared for so many years. It’s an idea that’s not lost on the group, especially during a time when the world seems so full of rage and divisiveness. “We came up with this idea of ‘joyful rebellion,’ choosing joy and that being sort of like the rebellion of the record,” says Price.
Good Together is the product of everyday conversations we’re all having and how to overcome the challenges that face us as a society and personally. And like the album, Lake Street Dive celebrates life’s ups and downs, the ebbs and flows. They take the human experience, embrace it all, assure you that we’ll get through this together, and then offer you musical comfort.
“Whether or not you’re cynical or you’re hopeful, or you’re despairing, here we are and here we go. What are we gonna do?” says Calabrese. “I think we’re doing our best as artists to do the job that artists should do, which is [to] reflect what’s going on, whether it’s what’s going on in the world or what’s going on in you…”