Lake Street Dive: From Dive Bars To Madison Square Garden

Ahead of their upcoming Australian tour – which includes an outdoor shindig under the stars, as part of Melbourne’s Live At The Gardens series, that’s bound to go off! – we check in with Lake Street Dive’s Australian-born vocalist Rachael Price and bassist/background vocalist Bridget Kearney to discuss that Kevin Bacon tweet, composing Somebody Feed Phil’s theme song, how a 20-sided-dice informed songwriting sessions for their latest Good Together set, their recent Madison Square Garden performance and so much more.

Lake Street Dive had just wrapped their European tour at the time of our chat. Price – who moved to Tennessee with her family when she was three years old – Zooms in from Brooklyn (“I'm on the floor in my bedroom,” she chuckles), whereas Kearney is in New Jersey, having just taught a songwriting class at Princeton University. “I'm borrowing someone's office – that's why I have these cool books behind me,” the bassist confesses.

On returning to live performance, post-Covid cancellations

Bridget Kearney: “[It was] so emotional. So, so joyful. I remember our first concert was a festival in Florida. [Northern Hemisphere] Spring of 2021 – that was our first time back after a year or so of all our shows being cancelled. And there was a band – I think it was The War And Treaty that was on before us, earlier on the same day. And even just listening to them, I was in tears; just to be at a concert like that again! And then, you know, when we got to play our set, I felt the same thing. It was something that I missed so much and was so grateful to have back.”

Rachael Price: “We love to bring people into a room and let them share that space together; it's dancing, specifically. There's a song on the record [2024’s Good Together] called Dance With A Stranger that was, like, inspired by a square dance in upstate New York that was really cool in the way that it was mixing up all these people from different parts of the community and just totally normalising the act of, like, ‘Hello, stranger, would you like to hug and spin around the room together for three minutes?’ – you know? Like, ‘Great!’”

Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter

**How did you hear about Kevin Bacon’s endorsement tweet for your I Want You Back cover?**

Price: “I think we were all together, right?”

Kearney: “That sounds right.”

Price: “That's how I remember it. It was a while ago. But I think we were all together because we were new on Twitter, and Twitter was brand new anyway. And we didn't understand how it worked – tweeting at somebody or anything like that; it was all a new frontier.

“It's funny now that everybody's on the internet, you know what I mean? And you can message anybody, and sometimes you see a famous person's comment on your video post or whatever, and you're like, ‘Oh, that's cool they posted’. But, at the time – which was what? Ten, 12 years ago [in 2012] – a celebrity tweeting at you, which we didn't even get, was just like – I think we all screamed. We thought it was the funnest.

“It actually was the funnest, coolest thing ever because it did make that video go viral. And it did help us a lot. Kevin Bacon ended up helping us, for sure. So it was wild, in that instance, that something like that can give a band such a big boost. Sometimes, the internet is cool.

“And I actually think we saw that the video was blowing up first – we just noticed that the views had drastically gone up. And then we were able to trace it back to this Kevin Bacon tweet. And then that started a Reddit thread, and the Reddit thread made it get a lot more views. But I'm pretty sure it started with Kevin Bacon, because what did he say in the tweet? I can't remember it now…”

Bacon shared the link below, alongside the comment: “This is amazing! Gives me chills!”

Kearney: “It's interesting, ‘cause sometimes people who are starting out in the music industry, they'll come up and say, ‘How do you find success in the industry?’ And it's just never replicable; you never know what's gonna happen that changes the course of your life. And you would never say to someone, ‘Well, you have to reach Kevin Bacon first. He holds the key,’ you know?

“You just keep being you, keep making your thing, keep making good music, and something will eventually happen.”

What were your hopes and dreams back when Lake Street Dive formed 20 years ago?

Price: “I think just to play in dive bars, just to, like, have gigs. I feel like that was it! Have gig. Be band.”

Kearney: “[Laughs] Right. Step one: Play song. Step two: Have gig.”

Price: “Yeah, and Bridget wrote a song [Sometimes When I'm Drunk And You're Wearing My Favorite Shirt] that we put into a songwriting contest, and it won [the 2005 John Lennon Songwriting Contest – Jazz category], and she won some money. And then she immediately put it back into the band. And that was the most exciting thing we could imagine at the time: going into the studio for two days and recording a record. I just remember being like, ‘This is the coolest thing that's ever happened to me; I can't believe we're going into a studio!’”

Kearney: “To make an album!”

**On rolling a 20-sided-dice in some Good Together songwriting sessions**

Kearney: “Akie [Bermiss, keyboardist] and I play Dungeons & Dragons together – it's a roleplaying game. You inhabit a character, and then the dice roll kind of introduces something that you can't control – something that you just have to go with and make the most of.

“So that was how it was helpful in the songwriting process: we were relinquishing control and choice of certain elements and then making music out of whatever was there. So, yeah! The dice rolls decided chords, tempo and metre for us, and then we would workshop whatever that was – make it into something that felt musical to us.

“And then one or the other of us would take that away and kinda write melodies and lyrics over the top of whatever emotion that we created with those dice rolls. So it really helped to get us to some new places – get us out of some habits – and, yeah, just find some new stuff, which is always good after 20 years.

“It forced spontaneity. Like, we would give ourselves about a half hour to workshop those chords, metre, tempo as a band, and then we gave ourselves exactly a half hour, like, ‘Okay, hey, Rachel, take this little four-bar loop that we just made, write a song over it. You have a half hour,’ which I think – to me, as a songwriter, it's so helpful to have that kind of deadline where you're just like, ‘Okay, I'm going to ignore all of this self-doubt… I'm just gonna write a song and then listen to it and see if it's good,’ you know?”

These rolling dice sessions birthed three album tracks: Good Together, Far Gone and Walking Uphill.

The inspo behind Party On The Roof – another Good Together highlight

Kearney: “I mean, Rachael and I both live in Brooklyn, and there are some wonderful rooftops there. In my mind, that song takes place in a large apartment building that has, like, hundreds of units, and you just find your way up there and meet the people that live on the second floor, and you're like, ‘Oh, cool! Whaddaya do? Where are you from?’ you know? It's like a place for connection. And then you're also in apartment living, you're kinda cooped up, but you're out in the open air and looking over this incredible cityscape. So, yeah! [The rooftop] is just a great place to hang out.”

On composing the theme song for the travel doco series Somebody Feed Phil

Kearney: “So we met Phil, Phil Rosenthal, through a mutual friend, Gabe Witcher, who's the violin player who used to play in the Punch Brothers and does a lotta sessions and soundtracks and such – he had just introduced Phil to our music. And so Phil had come to see the band a few times in LA, where he lives, and took us out to dinner one time, and so we got to know him. And then, when he was making the show for Netflix, he reached out and said, ‘I love your music. I'd love for you guys to do it,’ which was really cool because it felt like we could be ourselves on the theme song.

“You know, sometimes when you're writing for a commercial or something that's outside of just your own album, you sort of have to put on a costume and be something that's different from what you normally do. But I felt like – in this context – he came to us because he wanted it to sound like Lake Street Dive, and so we just wrote what sounded good to us. And he actually threw us some lyrics, which we started with; some of the lyrics are Phil's writing.

“And then we also got to watch a couple of the episodes of the previous incarnation of the show, which I think was on a different network, and kinda got a sense for what the message of the show is, which I think has a lot to do with human connection – beyond just food, but, like, the way that food brings people together and creates these friendships and stuff. So, yeah! From watching the show, that kind of helped us also write the lyrics and stuff.

“People request it a lot, which is fun: ‘Somebody Feed Phil!’”

Musical origins

Price: “I started singing pretty young because my dad [Tom Price] was a choir conductor. So I sang in choir [The Voices Of Bahá], and he started giving me solos with the choir when I was, like, ten, which was pretty nice. And we sang a range of styles. I mean, I ended up singing a lot of gospel in the choir, but I started singing jazz when I was, like, five or six.

“And that's what I was really obsessed with, which is what led me to go to NEC [New England Conservatory Of Music, where she met fellow students/future founding members of Lake Street Dive: Kearney, drummer Michael Calabrese and former guitarist, Mike “McDuck” Olson].

“So, yeah! I was just in front of people at a really young age and always really loved it.”

Kearney: “[Picking up the bass] was a pretty practical choice. I just wanted to start playing an instrument really bad, and the school system started the orchestra a year earlier than the band. I was so eager that I was like, ‘I can't wait another year to get one of those cool, shiny band instruments like a saxophone or trumpet. So I'll just pick one of these instruments for now.’ I was planning to switch, but then by the time I got through one year of playing bass in the school orchestra, I was like, ‘Actually, I really like this!’

“So it was almost an accident. But I'm glad that it worked out that way because it's something I really connect to. I also love how versatile it is as an instrument – it just kinda exists in almost every style of music, so I can fit in with a lotta different situations and learn a lotta different styles of music. And then that all comes back into Lake Street Dive and into writing projects.”

Bridget’s bass heroes

Kearney: “I went through different phases. I was into classical music for a while, I was very into Edgar Meyer, and was very into jazz for a while: I was into Christian McBride and Paul Chambers and Reid Anderson – the bass player from The Bad Plus. And then, with pop music or rock music, I've always loved Paul McCartney's bass playing a lot, and James Jamerson, who was on a lot of Motown sessions playing bass.

“And then a bunch of great teachers, actually, in Iowa City, too, whose playing was amazing. My high school bass teacher, Mark Urness. A friend of my family’s who I just got to see play the other night in Oslo Philharmonic. So it was really cool to just run into her. We were on tour there, and I found out she was playing that night and got to go see it. It was so cool.”

How did you emotionally prepare to play NY’s 19,500-capacity Madison Square Garden?

Price: “I think a big part of it was feeling like the show was ready for a venue of that size. And we really stepped up our production for this last year with a really specific lighting show and a really beautiful backdrop.

“On a lot of the bigger shows – including that show – we often had four other musicians joining us: the same horn section that was on our record called the Huntertones, and we also had a percussionist playing with us. So I think we felt armed to be on a stage that big. Do you know what I mean? ‘Cause the band felt really, really huge and really, really exciting. And I feel like, yeah!

“The day, specifically, was all about that sound check. I think we all woke up with a sense of like, ‘Oh my God! What are we doing today?’ And felt really kind of uneasy and nervous in different ways. And as soon as we got on the stage at the sound check and played – and knew that it was gonna sound good, and felt comfortable – it was just all excitement, I feel like.

“Then the show – you were just on a high the whole time. I dunno, it just felt like we were all at a ten, all happy the whole time. Honestly, the only disappointing part is that I think we actually talked so much about all the various things that were exciting to us – to the audience – that we couldn't even play our whole set! We had to cut a couple songs. We basically got kicked off the stage at Madison Square Garden [laughs]. If you play too long there, there's too many union rules; they charge you a lot of money.

“I was like, ‘That never happens!’ Our set is never longer than the time that it takes. But we were just in a different time and space there. It felt really, really good.”

Kearney: “There were a few moments where I really felt like I got to sink my teeth into it, I guess. For You're Still The One [Shania Twain cover] – that was the one where everyone got their cell phones out, and were doing ‘the lighter move’ with the cell phone lights and, yeah! The space just spontaneously invited them to do that.

“That's another thing – it's never happened at any other show. But something about the way the audience surrounds you there [at Madison Square Garden] sort of makes the audience turn into its own living being. So one person does something, and it sorta gets communicated around and, yeah! That was a moment where I was like, ‘Oh, o-kay.’ And it's also an easy song on the bass, so I can just kinda enjoy it [laughs].”

Favourite memories from previous Australian tours

Price: “One of my favourite memories was: I think the first tour we did, we played south of Perth, near a town called Albany. My mom is from Perth, and she talked about it and would describe it growing up. And I had family members there. I mean, distant relatives that I had no knowledge of or hadn't met before. And many of them came up to me after the show and were like, ‘We're related in this way and this way.’ And I was like, ‘This is so cool!’

“I think actually I'd only been there once before that first tour, but, yeah! I always feel a connection with Australia when I'm there because even though I grew up in the States, my mom's from there.”

Kearney: “I have a lotta fond memories. But, for some reason, the first one that comes to mind is: I was sitting on the balcony with Mike [Calabrese], our drummer, and one of our sound crew members at the hotel, and this huge bat came swooping through. And Luke, our sound crew guy, fell backwards on this chair – he was so shocked [laughs].

“It's always awesome to see the wildlife in a new place, especially in Australia; there's some things that are so different from what we have – just out there in the wild, not even at the zoo!”

Lake Street Dive will tour Australia this March. Remaining tickets are available now via Frontier Touring and the Live At The Gardens website.