After shaking things up with a New Year’s Eve show at Chicago’s Salt Shed, Lake Street Dive has embarked on a European tour in support of their eighth album, Good Together.
Lake Street Dive has a sound that can’t quite be described. It’s a mélange of soul, funk, jazz, yacht rock and other influences. They are known for their killer cover versions of songs like Hall and Oates’ “Rich Girl” and the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want it That Way.” And while their eight studio albums all sound great, they are one of those bands that are best seen live.
That’s one of the reasons why they’ve headlined at places like Madison Square Garden and are a hot ticket at festivals like Telluride and the Newport Folk Festival. After knocking the audience dead at the Salt Shed, they’re off to do a slew of gigs across Europe to showcase songs from Good Together and other releases.
As a band that’s been together since 2004, Lake Street Dive knows a thing or two about producing good music. They started out in Boston at the New England Conservatory of Music but took their name from a street in Minneapolis that’s dotted with dive bars. The band consists of vocalist Rachael Price, bassist/background vocalist, Bridget Kearney, drummer/background vocalist, Mike Calabrese, keyboardist/vocalist, Akie Bermiss, and guitarist/background vocalist, James Corneilson, who joined the band in 2021 after founder Mike “Mad Duck” Olson’s departure.
Circling back to their latest release, Good Together is aptly named. In early 2023, the entire band gathered at Calabrese’s place in Vermont to create an album that was a collaborative effort from start to finish. The band believes that holing up in Vermont “ended up taking us to new places that we never would have got to otherwise, in terms of things like harmony, tempo and groove,” according to Kearney.
When it came to creating the tunes on Good Together, the band devised an interesting way to delegate each song’s development. They utilized a 20-sided dice that the “captain” of each song would roll with the one picked being responsible for deciding the chords, meter, and tempo.
Besides enhancing their sound, these shared experiences led to a higher level of intimacy and camaraderie between band members. Price noted that, “at first it was terrifying to write together in the same room, but as soon as we got started it felt so fun. We very quickly realized, ‘Oh, we need to do this again and again.’”
As Lake Street Dive kicks off the year 2025 by playing live for European audiences, their ever-expanding American fan base is hoping to see them tour the states again sometime soon. And, if their appearance at the Salt Shed is any indication, they’re sure to be a hot ticket when they get back to performing here in the US.
Images: © Michael Lepek for American Blues Scene
