Lake Street Dive on Signing to Nonesuch, Channeling Bowie
In the spring of 2012, Lake Street Dive played a soulful, stripped-down cover of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” on a street corner in Brighton, Massachusetts. The band uploaded a video of the performance to YouTube, with a plug for their then-new EP, and before long, the quirky Boston indie-pop quartet had gone viral, racking up a million streams. (The clip has currently been viewed more than 3.5 million times.) Further boosted by an appearance at 2013’s T Bone Burnett–produced, Inside Llewyn Davis–inspired “Another Day, Another Time” concert in New York City, and dedicated touring up and down the East Coast, Lake Street Dive‘s popularity skyrocketed just in time for their 2014 breakout album, Bad Self Portraits.
Rachael Price (the sultry-voiced singer), Bridget Kearney (bassist), Mike Olson (the guitarist-trumpeter, a native of the Minneapolis town from which the band draws its name) and Mike Calabrese (drummer) met as students studying jazz at Boston’s New England Conservatory back in 2004. As Lake Street Dive, they serve up pop with a timeless feel, incorporating heavy overtones of classic R&B and jazz. This year, they’re tweaking the formula further on Side Pony (due out February 19th), with influences from disco and rock & roll, and their first-ever song in a minor key. “We don’t want to become a formulaic band,” Kearney told Rolling Stone. “We want to continually be evolving.” Kearney talked more about the upcoming album, working with producer Dave Cobb (Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton, etc.) and getting signed to Nonesuch Records.
How did Side Pony come about?
We’ve been a band for coming on 12 years, and we got to this point where we were like, “OK, we’re ready. It’s time. Let’s do it.” We knew that we had a lot more fans than we have ever had before and that we were walking onto a bigger stage with this record. Basically, our initial concept was to do something that pushed us to try new things, something that’s a bit of a wild card.
How did the band’s sound evolve on this album?
There are some songs on the record that are like the next evolution of where we see the band going after Bad Self Portraits. There are new instruments and new ways of writing that are present, both in the songs that we wrote together in the studio and each in our own individual writing. We all kind of learned some new tricks and tried different things. “Can’t Stop,” that’s the one that we wrote in the studio together. It’s minor, which is — believe it or not — our first ever minor song.
And this is your first time working with Dave Cobb …
Yeah, we recorded with him at the Sound Emporium in Nashville. We felt that he’s been making records that are really interesting and fresh and not cookie-cutter in any way. He’s a guy with a lot of ideas and a lot of creativity. The Sturgill Simpson record really caught our ears and made us want to work with him.