Jazz/Pop/Soul Act Lake Street Dive Continues to Evolve

Lake Street Dive drummer Mike Calabrese admits the jazz/pop/rock band was “barely good” in the early days when the group of music school students from Boston started playing live.

“We all went to jazz school together, so no matter what we did, it would be jazzy,” he explains via phone from New York, where he was doing “promotional stuff” for the new album, Good Together . Lake Street Dive performs at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, July 9, at TempleLive at the Cleveland Masonic . Singer-songwriter Alisa Amador opens the show. “It was long extended improvisational sessions and lots of lyrics. It was really experimental. But we started touring and playing in bars and would see what people responded to. If we had some nice hooks, we could keep people’s attention and that allowed us to move away from the more improvisational stuff. Now, we’re always trying to crack that timeless pop music code.”

Songs for Good Together , started coming together in January of 2023 when the band assembled as a group in Calabrese’s basement and began writing together for the first time ever.

“We’ve always written as individuals and then brought songs to the group,” Calabrese says. “For the most part, it has been individual stuff. We forced each other to get vulnerable.”

Aside from the new approach to songwriting, Calabrese says the band didn’t intend to do anything differently with this album.

“Hopefully what’s happening to us every time we go to make a record is that we maybe change personally and get intrigued by new stuff, and that makes its way into the songs. If you’re writing songs and making music that’s honest about what you’re going through at that time, then hopefully everything sounds a little bit different.”

The group went to Nashville to record once again with Grammy-winning producer Mike Elizondo (Fiona Apple, Sheryl Crow, Gary Clark Jr.).

“He had reached out to us years and years ago about possibly working together,” Calabrese says of Elizondo. “When it came time for us to record the record that became [2021's] Obviously , he was interested. We liked the result so much that we called him up again for this latest one.”

With its lilting keyboard riff and spirited horns, the album's title track really swings.

“I don’t know what inspired the lyrics per se, but originally, [keyboardist] Akie [Bermiss] had this idea for it," says Calabrese. "He wanted it to be from the point of view of an AI machine talking to a human about being a couple. I don’t know if it maintained that, but we rolled a 20-sided die and came up with parameters for chords, tempo and time signature and jammed on it for a bit. We did that for about three or four days when we were hanging in my basement, but only three songs from the fruits of our labor made the record. When you’re rolling die for musical parameters, you get bonkers stuff.”

For “Better Not Tell You,” Bermiss started writing a musical to Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Macbeth asked a group of sisters who could see the future to tell him what would happen to him. The sisters refused to divulge what they saw.

“That’s the subtext for that song,” explains Calabrese. “That was the inspiration for that song. It shows you how intellectual [Bermiss] is and how nerdy we are.”

The group then effectively slows things down for the ballad “Twenty-Five,” which Calabrese describes as a more mature breakup tune.

“That one was prompted by some chords and melody that [bassist-singer] Bridget [Kearney] had going, but [singer] Rachael [Price] had given a song prompt for a song that is older and more mature,” Calabrese explains. “Looking back on it, you are fond of the breakup, and you can see how neither of you were the same person. It’s a nostalgic breakup song. It’s like, ‘How nice. We had that thing, but we don’t have it anymore.’ Now that we’re closing in on 40, the breakup songs take on a different tone.”

Good Together follows 2022’s Fun Machine: The Sequel , a six-track covers EP with songs by Bonnie Raitt, the Pointer Sisters and Carole King,

“Choosing covers is always an interesting process in and of itself,” says Calabrese. “We reached back to the 1990s for some things. We did it over the course of a couple of days in Brooklyn. It was very much like getting live takes and feeling it out and not using click tracks on everything. It was a super collaborative effort. Reimagining other people’s music comes with a lot less pressure. The song is the song. Hopefully, we picked good ones that people like.”

Lake Street Dive's summer tour has yet to start and a mid-June show at Asbury Park was rained out, but Calabrese says the group is rehearsed and ready to go.

“We just did a show at a radio station for about 500 people, and that was a nice warmup,” he says. “We did Colbert last night, and that was really fun. We have the plans for the show we’re going to do. We’re ready to start getting to it.”

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