An Interview with Lake Street Dive

After years of hard work, the Boston quartet Lake Street Dive, fronted by the incred­i­ble Rachael Price, has taken the music scene by storm. The acclaimed Bad Self Por­traits hit the scene in Feb­ru­ary 2014. Not a week later the sim­i­larly named sin­gle was named iTunes Sin­gle of the Week. They are now playing the recently born Boston Calling music festival on Sunday, September 7th, alongside the incredible talent of Lorde, The National, The Replacements, and the likes. With the festival approaching, I had the chance to sit down and talk to Lake Street’s drum­mer Michael Cal­abrese about the band’s influ­ences, their music, and their newest album.

To start, you guys worked for a long time before com­ing upon your fame. What keeps you going in such a tough indus­try when all forces seem to be against you?

At the heart of it we’re all good friends and have been so since the begin­ning. With any of the adver­sity we’ve faced along the way this sim­ple fact has kept us going. Even when we didn’t have much of a direc­tion styl­is­ti­cally, and had lit­tle ambi­tion of ever turn­ing our music into a career, we still would get together, book gigs, and enjoy each other’s com­pany. If that hadn’t been so easy we may never have made it past our 2nd or 3rd year as a band.

But when your suc­cess did come, it seems — at least from the out­side — to have come at a rel­a­tively quick pace. You went from YouTube sen­sa­tions to hav­ing the iTunes sin­gle of the week in a pretty short period of time. It wasn’t overnight, but it must have seemed quick based on all of the work you guys had put it. What is that suc­cess like com­pared to the long, stren­u­ous work?

The suc­cess is encour­ag­ing! The hard work hasn’t stopped. We’re still on the road a lot and although our con­ve­niences have increased, so have our respon­si­bil­i­ties and assets. At least now there is tan­gi­ble fruits of our labor. That keeps us going as well.

Now to your music. You guys have two incred­i­ble albums of orig­i­nals out: your epony­mous fresh­man effort and the more recent Bad Self Por­traits. Then in the midst of this you have Fun Machine: your release of five cov­ers and one orig­i­nal. It is clearly the outlier. Can you give us some insight into how that came about and how the songs were chosen?

The head of our label came up with that idea, actu­ally. We were freshly signed and low on new mate­r­ial and he sug­gested it as a way not only to keep inter­est alive between orig­i­nal albums but show fans and new pos­si­ble mar­kets what kind of influ­ences we drew from. Some of the songs we’d been play­ing since the begin­ning, like “I Want You Back.” “Let Me Roll It” was cho­sen lit­er­ally weeks before the record­ing ses­sion. Some cov­ers just speak to you; oth­ers need to be cho­sen because of how well they work with our trumpet/bass instru­men­ta­tion. A song with a lot of chords and lim­ited melodic hooks or sig­na­ture bass lines wouldn’t work as well.

Jump­ing to the song­writ­ing process for a moment. I notice that on your web­site you have a tab that gives you a direct link to your lyrics. I can only name a hand­ful of other peo­ple who have some­thing like that, one being Bruce Spring­steen. In his case, lyrics are extremely impor­tant to his music. Do lyrics take prece­dence in your song­writ­ing process? Or is there some­thing else that plays the most impor­tant role in your writing?

Whether or not the lyrics come first when any of us sit down to write a song, which varies each time, they are cer­tainly impor­tant to us. We’re all stu­dents of peo­ple like Carol King and Paul Simon and the like, who wrote songs with unde­ni­ably mem­o­rable melodies but also mean­ing­ful lyrics. That’s what we go for when writ­ing a song: bring­ing folks in with catch­i­ness and then hav­ing words there wait­ing for them that hope­fully resonate.

Now, every­body has his or her own opin­ion on who you sound like and who influ­ences you guys. Peo­ple list every­thing from Etta James to Amy Wine­house to a jazz­ier ver­sion of Adele. What is your own take on your sound? Which artists have actu­ally had sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on you?

Our short answer in regard to our sound is pop/soul, so all those artists men­tioned could cer­tainly share a genre with us, but we don’t pro­duce things like any of those artists, and their bands cer­tainly dif­fer in instru­men­ta­tion, so it’s hard to say. It’s easy to say “jazz” when you see us because of the jazz school con­nec­tion and the fact that there’s a trum­pet and an upright bass, but that’s cer­tainly not what we’re going for. Jazz is evi­denced as part of our inter­ac­tive stage show and it’s cer­tainly there in occa­sional solos and har­monic choices we make, but in the end we’re not try­ing to do any­thing inten­tion­ally jazzy. It’s like hav­ing a cast iron skil­let: every­thing you make in there is going to be tinged with the fla­vor of the pan and every­thing that came before it. The taste of the food, how­ever, is up to the choice of ingre­di­ents, and those ingre­di­ents we focus on are dance­able beats, hooky melodies, and hope­fully some hon­est, res­onat­ing lyrics.

I have never had the plea­sure of see­ing you guys per­form live, but from what I read, your live sound breathes new life into your music. What does the live set­ting allow you to do with your songs that the stu­dio just can’t?

In a word, inter­ac­tion. A lot of these songs we’ve been play­ing for a while, night after night, and to keep sane it’s impor­tant for us to be able to play with the songs in regard to what we do per­son­ally and as a band. It’s not that we’re bored or sick of any­thing we play. It’s just biol­ogy. We com­bat the poten­tial for com­pla­cency and autopi­lot play­ing by dish­ing out a judi­cious bit of wild card choices that will hope­fully keep your band mates and the audience’s inter­est piqued.

The stu­dio is project-goal based music making and in the end becomes inher­ently “part” and calculation-oriented. How­ever, we do like choos­ing zesty per­for­mances that con­tain that inter­ac­tive qual­ity as the basic tracks for songs on records. They inspire more ideas and keep the over­dubs exciting.

Lastly, on a more per­sonal note, I go to Boston Col­lege and right off of Com­mon­wealth Avenue in Brighton there is a street called Lake Street. I believe that the band was named after a Min­nesota street, but I real­ize that you guys all met in Boston and recorded your “I Want You Back” cover in Brighton. Any con­nec­tion to that street?

Didn’t know that!  No con­nec­tion to that par­tic­u­lar one but as it turns out, there’s a Lake Street in pretty much every city we’ve been to, even if they’re lit­er­ally hun­dreds of miles from the near­est lake. There are plenty of words in the Eng­lish lan­guage. Are the city plan­ners get­ting lazy? What­ever the case may be, it’s cool that there’s a ubiq­ui­tous qual­ity to the name. It’ll help us con­nect with everyone!

Check out the video that made Lake Street Dive famous here.

Get their music here.

Like them on Facebook.

Follow them on Twitter.

See Lake Street Dive at Boston Calling.

Boston College Student. Wearer of Extra Medium Pants. Lover of the Key of C#m. Collector of Wishing Well Change. Writer of Your Thoughts.

View all articles by Chris Dalla Riva