Back in 2018, Lake Street Dive premiered a new song, “Shame, Shame, Shame,” that didn’t name names but was pretty much aimed at certain president in power at the time: “Bet you think you’re a big man now/But you don’t know how to be a good man too,” the band’s Rachael Price sang.
After a while, the song was dropped from the set; “it felt briefly irrelevant,” says bassist Bridget Kearney. When the group hits the road this summer and into the fall ahead of the November election, however, fans should expect to hear it again. “That song isn’t veiled. It was definitely written about Trump,” Price says. “But it’s written about anyone like him, who is lying to people and using their platform to just get where they want to be. We thought it would be fun to bring it back.”
And this time around, more people are likely to hear it. Lake Street Dive’s tour, behind its eighth album, Good Together, out this week, includes amphitheaters and medium-sized halls — but also several major indoor venues, including their first-ever headlining show at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Their manager recently cracked to Billboard that her clients are “the biggest band that no one’s ever heard of,” and the members of Lake Street Dive don’t disagree.
“I think she’s right, and it’s a phenomenon that’s interesting to inhabit,” says Kearney. “When we tell people we’re playing Madison Square Garden, they’re oftentimes surprised and say, ‘Who are you opening for?’ And it’s like, ‘No, it’s us. It’s our show.’ We’ve somehow managed to accumulate a large fan base without a large public presence. It does feel strange, but maybe it’s a blessing. I can go out and watch the opener and enjoy the scene and totally blend into the crowd.”
On the surface, that trend seems to put them in line with a string of like-minded roots artists — Zach Bryan, Billy Strings, Nathaniel Rateliff — who continue to pull in music fans in search of alternatives to modern pop and something that is less embellished and more “authentic,” whatever that means in 2024. Price doesn’t see such a divide but admits the audience for bands like hers can be overlooked. “I do think that sometimes the world of Top 40 pop underestimates the listener and underestimates their ability to listen to a wide range of music,” she says. “Or to something that has acoustic instruments or something that isn’t Auto-Tuned or doesn’t sound like a cookie-cutter version of the last hit they heard. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a backlash against cookie-cutter pop, but there are more people out there than you realize who want to hear people playing their instruments.”
A gig at Madison Square Garden, 20 years after the band started, encapsulates Lake Street Dive’s slow, uphill climb. What Price calls “a young jazz band trying to sound weird” began in 2004 when she, Kearney, guitarist Mike “McDuck” Olson, and drummer Mike Calabrese were students at the New England Conservatory of Music. There, they attempted a gangly fusion of country and free jazz — the latter playing off Price’s chanteuse-worthy pipes — but, bit by bit, they came upon a merger of Motown, soul, jazz, swing, and rootsy pop.
In 2012, Kevin Bacon tweeted out their cover of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” (“This is amazing! Gives me chills!”), and the following year, T Bone Burnett invited them to participate in a New York concert timed to the release of the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. There, they found themselves on a bill with Patti Smith, Jack White, Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford, Joan Baez, and others. They wound up in a photo shoot with Costello, who didn’t know who they were, and being hugged by Baez.
The band experienced setbacks along the way. Since Price had signed a solo deal with another label, their breakthrough album, Bad Self Portraits, had to sit in the can for a while before it was released in 2014. Then, in 2021, Olson left the band to devote more time to family. “It was hard to lose a band member,” says Kearney. “But it would be a shame to think of that in any way as a failure, because it was 17 years of being in a band together, and we got to do a lot of awesome things together. So everyone was immediately supportive of him. And, you know, just trying to figure out the way forward.”
As the years passed, the group’s sound expanded even further with the hiring of Akie Bermiss, whose keyboards and synths broadened their palette. Along the way, they’ve managed to score a few adult-alternative radio hits, like “Good Kisser,” “Hypotheticals,” and their current bop, “Good Together.” But Lake Street Dive hasn’t yet cracked the pop Top 40, and Price claims they’re fine with that. “It’s a blessing to not have a hit,” she says. “I wouldn’t want us to be known for just one song. I wouldn’t necessarily want people to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, that song. That’s what you guys do.’ I don’t think we ever go out saying, ‘If we don’t play this one, everyone’s going to boo and leave.’ I feel like our fans are invested in our catalog. Our goal has just been to make music you like to play and start from there.”
With new guitarist James Cornelison in the mix, Good Together injects a few new twists into the band’s old-school groove pop. “Party on the Roof” is their take on grab-a-brewski country songs, but in an urban setting, and they also slip in social commentary in “Help Is on the Way” (about excessive self-care) and “Far Gone” (which touches on climate change).
What you won’t hear are breakup songs. “A pitfall of the aging songwriter is that we start running out of those sorts of juicy details,” admits Price. “We were setting out to write songs that had joy in them and a lot of hope. We came up with this concept of ‘joyful rebellion,’ which is a term Bridget coined. We’re trying to not get too overwhelmed by how bad things are.”
Another song on Good Together, “Seats at the Bar,” inspired what amounts to Lake Street Dive adapting to larger venues. For the first time, they turned to a set designer, and the result is an onstage bar stocked with one beverage or another. As Kearney says, it’s a bit high-concept: “We’ve always considered our sound the kind of music you would listen to in a bar.”
But it’s also Lake Street Dive’s acknowledgement that a slightly flashier show matches their newfound status. “We’ve been trying to get less and less weird,” Price says. “We’ve just been doing it so slowly.”
Nicolas Gerardin
