Everyone loves a buddy story. From watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Friends, we all want to sneak into the group hug that is a tremendous collaborative friendship. Likewise, fans of Lake Street Dive get to bask in the band’s amiable partnership that permeates their son-of-Motown sound.
In the early 2000s, the founding members were jazz students at the New England Conservatory of Music who got together one day to experiment with combining country music with free jazz. The music didn’t click, but the members did. “I’m just like, it’s so cool to get to hang out with them,” said drummer Mike Calabrese of his bandmates. “And I think we have that with each other.”
When they began to play together regularly, they brought in the music they loved from outside the jazz canon, from Erykah Badu to Weezer. “Each of us had—it was almost closeted, you know,” Calabrese said of their non-jazz faves. “You didn’t really talk about that in a jazz school, right? And so, when we started branching out and playing more shows together, we started realizing, ‘Oh, we love this stuff.'”
The friends played together but also pursued other projects, but Lake Street Dive eventually began to find an audience. Bassist Bridget Kearney won the John Lennon Songwriting Competition in 2005 in the jazz category, which gave them the resources to record their first album.
An informal video of them doing a slow-rolling version of the Jacksons’ “I Want You Back” on a Boston sidewalk went viral after an unlikely boost from Kevin Bacon, who came across the song and posted about it. “I think each of us kind of feels in a sense, ‘I can’t believe I got to play in a band with Rachael Price as the singer,'” he said. “She’s one of the best singers of our generation in the United States. That’s not me being egotistical about my band. I’m so in awe of her talent, and Bridget’s one of the best songwriters of our generation. And I would add Akie [Bermiss] into that too; Akie is just one of the more interesting people I think I’ve ever met.”
Lake Street Dive’s fan base grew with each album, tour, and media appearance. In 2017, they added keyboard player Bermiss, playfully “proposing” to him one night at dinner with plastic engagement rings. Their contagious playfulness lives on: they have developed a Halloween tradition of dressing up to perform jokey covers of their favorite pop hits—from a rooftop rendition of the Beatles‘ “Don’t Let Me Down” to a hotel-poolside version of the B-52’s “Love Shack”.
Almost 20 years after their first performance, Lake Street Dive have released their eighth album, Good Together. It was supported by a national tour capped by their first appearance at New York’s iconic Madison Square Garden. Calabrese said that the bandmates decided on a new approach that took their collaborative relationship to a deeper level. “Collaborative songwriting is something that has always been an aspect of what we do,” Calabrese said. “But we’ve never set out to get in a room and, from zero, create songs together.”
The five members brought some inchoate song ideas to Calabrese’s home studio in Vermont instead of bringing in more fully formed tracks and then polishing them. “It was the most vulnerable we’ve been in a room with each other ever,” Calabrese said. “And so it was it was kind of awkward and it was tough to find a way in.”
“In general, it’s always been easier to work on your own and bring it in and put the Lake Street Dive spin on it,” Calabrese said. “Although, even since our eponymous album, we have collaborated technically, this time we’re edging closer to just being in the room and writing simultaneously.”
To get themselves out of the occasional bout of inertia, they would pull out a 20-sided die from a Dungeons & Dragon game and leave their next step up to chance. “It got the juices flowing. There are at least three songs on the record that started as successful roll attempts, leaving it up to chance,” Calabrese said. “So it was pretty fun, and that’s what kind of launched us into writing this new album.”
While Lake Street Dive’s short, catchy songs are not classifiable as jazz, Calabrese said their formal training is still embedded in their music. “Having studied jazz has given us a vocabulary that we can discuss music in and explore music through,” he said. “It’s like a perspective; it’s opened our ears, and it’s kind of given us possibilities and also a certain amount of confidence in exploring possibilities. So it’s kind of like the essence of exploration and pushing ourselves and making yourself intentionally uncomfortable to discover some kind of new inspiring sound. It’s like we’re not settling on what our genre is or what we’re doing. We have more of an orientation that’s kind of just like, ‘What’s the next thing that’s going to get us going’? And I think, in a general sense, that is a jazz attitude.”
Calabrese said that one of the main thematic missions for the album was to be a counterweight to the country’s current climate of divisiveness and resentment. “Bridget brought that term ‘joyful rebellion’ into the mix early on,” Calabrese said. “I think it’s one of these things—it seems so simple and cliche, but it’s just that much more easy to forget … We’re not claiming to be rebels in any sense.”
One example of this joyful rebellion is the song “Dance With a Stranger”, which originated when Kearney, on a whim, went to a square dance in Kingston, New York. She was struck by the conviviality and openness there and that they could have fun dancing together despite people’s many differences. “Find someone’s eyes that are new to you,” Price sings on the track. “Might be a child or a grandfather; anyone will do. Go say ‘Hello,’ say ‘How do you do?'”
Lake Street Dive’s “we’re just like you” vibe is embodied in many of its songs, which speak to listeners as peers. In “Seats at the Bar”, Price sings of going into a crowded restaurant with a partner and just sidling up to eat at the bar, or “Party on the Roof”, where she sings about the lack of space and surplus of good people in New York City, which leads to going to the roof to hang out.
“I’m the meditator in the band, and recently, a teacher of mine said to me you can actually meditate on joy,” Calabrese said. “And I was like, that sounds so stupid. Honestly, at first, I was like, ‘This is so cheesy.’ But you begin to realize that joy is very simple. Every newborn child has it. It’s just kind of [like] we all come downloaded with it. It’s not happily ever after. It’s not pure bliss or ecstasy. It’s almost like you realize it’s foundational to what it means to be just a vital living human being. And it’s something you can cultivate.
“I think we’ve always realized in our job that playing music is a joyous thing,” he continued. “It’s a beautiful thing when it comes out of joy, and it helps create joy in people. In a way, it’s nothing new for us, but it’s also in this way: Can we be more intentional about this?
“Some people are in some situations where it would be Pollyannish or disrespectful even to be like, ‘Oh, well, just try to cultivate joy in your situation,'” he added. “But I think if you have the resources, if you have the space, if you have the ability, and you’re not cultivating joy, then that is something dangerous for yourself and therefore society at large. I’ve been saying: ‘Take your joy seriously.'”