Lake Street Dive
Credit Shervin Lainez
After nearly two decades and one pandemic fronting Lake Street Dive, singer Rachael Price says the challenges of the Covid-19 era have brought the band closer together.
“We value our togetherness in a different way, because we couldn’t see each other for a couple years,” Price says. “We’re feeling really excited about making music. We’ve always been excited about it, but it feels different now.”
Lake Street Dive is scheduled to perform at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay on October 4 and 5, nearly a year to the day after their last San Diego show. Price says she requested adding a second show at Humphreys for this tour, both because of the venue itself and its location.
“We like the boat listeners,” Price says of the people who sometimes listen to Humphreys performances as they float on the water just outside. “We thought that was cool.”
While in San Diego, Price says the band enjoys how there are “so many fun, beautiful things to do throughout the day.” They like to do outdoorsy things between shows, such as hiking and playing tennis or pickleball. “If there’s some sort of adventurous activity we can do, that’s what we lean toward,” Price says.
The band, which formed in Boston in 2004, is known for defying genre labels and instead embracing several musical styles simultaneously. Their latest release, a six-track EP of cover songs called Fun Machine: The Sequel, is no exception.
Released in September by Fantasy Records as the follow-up to a 2012 set of covers, the new EP that Price describes as “long overdue” gives the Lake Street Dive treatment to songs made famous by Carole King, Dionne Warwick, Bonnie Raitt, the Pointer Sisters, the Cranberries and Shania Twain.
The track list was hand-selected over a couple of weeks by Price, bassist/background vocalist Bridget Kearney, drummer/background vocalist Mike Calabrese and keyboardist/vocalist Akie Bermiss. The band started with each member contributing favorite songs to a large playlist. From there, everyone identified their top five picks, and the trimming continued until the track list was set.
Price, a strong and soulful singer, says deciding how to apply her voice to a song’s lyrics played a big part in the selection process. Band-written liner notes suggest joy and self-reflection were also factors, with Price’s immediate decision to record Raitt’s “Nick of Time” after hearing the lyrics in a new way serving as one example.
Price says the band aspired to record the EP “as simply as possible,” with the live feel of their version of Twain’s “You’re Still the One,” being a perfect example of that goal met. On other tracks, Price says the band “got a little too excited about the production,” though those recordings were “really fun too.”
Lake Street Dive, hero
Credit Shervin Lainez
The groove is what they change most while covering these songs, Price says, citing their 1980s pop take on the Cranberries’ “Linger” as “a very Lake Street Dive move.” But in songwriting, the band takes a fluid approach to material.
“We wouldn’t necessarily say, ‘I know exactly how to write a Lake Street Dive song,’ because everybody writes a little bit differently,” Price says. In the early years, everyone brought songs to the table that the band collectively refined. But Price says they now write together, “There’s a lot more collaboration, which changes the types of songs that we end up writing.”
In addition to changing their songwriting approach, over the years, the band has identified a performance style that works for them. When Lake Street Dive was starting out, the band’s first task was to simply get their audience’s attention. Price says they would put “as much energy as we possibly could into every moment,” an approach she describes as an “insecurity or fear that this was the moment we had to seize.”
Price says there is “a lot more maturity” at a Lake Street Dive concert in 2022. “We’re not really scared of the quiet moments, and we realized that they really help the show,” Price says, adding that the band’s focus for concerts now is “creating lots of moments.”
Lake Street Dive owes a lot of its success to that ability to create moments, with viral street performance videos and late-night music spots throughout the 2010s pushing the band onward and upward. After seven studio albums and countless live performances over the course of the band’s career, Price says the “genre-less music” that in many ways defines them is something they are comfortable with and actively embrace.
“We are captivated by the idea of constantly changing up what we do,” she says.
