A Bridge Through the Genres

Lake Street Dive heads to Interlochen

By Ross Boissoneau | June 29, 2024

Try to define the sound of Lake Street Dive. Go ahead, just try. There are some jazzy overtones, but it sounds like pop music. There’s a bit of a country lilt to vocalist Rachael Price’s voice, but also a resonance straight from earthy 1960’s soul. The band has done songs by Hall & Oates, Bonnie Raitt, The Pointer Sisters, and George Michael, but Lake Street Dive is not a cover band (despite an occasional resemblance to Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox).

So does the band play funk? Give off Laurel Canyon-style singer/songwriter vibes? Indie rock? All the above?

Give up? So does Akie Bermiss—and he’s a member of the band. “I’m never prepared to answer that,” he says with a laugh. The keyboardist and vocalist says that lack of a defining style is a deliberate choice. “We draw from any musical influence we can and find a blend that’s pleasing and interesting to us.”

Their Own Voice

The band’s multiple influences are evident as it evolved from what it calls “a weird alt-country jazz group” to what might best be called a pop-soul outfit. It all started when band founder, guitarist/trumpeter Mike “McDuck” Olson, gathered three other New England Conservatory of Music classmates together—bassist Bridget Kearney, vocalist Rachael Price, and drummer/background vocalist Mike Calabrese—to create the band.

“Mr. McDuck assembled the four of us, said we were now Lake Street Dive, and we were a ‘free country’ band,” Kearney told Women’s Media Center. “He wrote this on a chalkboard in the ensemble room that we had our first rehearsal in. We intended to play country music in an improvised, avant-garde style – like Loretta Lynn meets Ornette Coleman.”

That didn’t last too long, as the band’s varied interests soon found it exploring a pop aesthetic, albeit one that leaned heavily on its members’ other musical interests. As they were all students at the New England Conservatory of Music, they had plenty of chops and varied musical interests.

Bermiss joined the band in 2018 after a stint as its touring keyboardist. “We had a lot of friends in common,” Bermiss explains. “In 2017 they asked me to come out on tour. There was no rehearsal time; it was a baptism by fire, getting into a band [everyone] knew as a four-piece. They were so accommodating, they made room for me. At the next recording session, I contributed some songs.” Before he knew it, he was a full-time member.

He says the sound of Lake Street Dive, with its multiple stylistic influences informing the music, comes from the fact everyone in the band is a songwriter. “Everyone has their own voice,” he says.

The Secret of Songwriting

Certainly the band is comfortable putting its own spin on material by other artists. Check its version of “Faith” or “I Want You Back” recorded live on a Boston sidewalk. But those are sidesteps from a band that pursues songwriting as a means of self-expression.

Typically the members bring sketched-out ideas for a song to the rest of the group to flesh out, but the band approached the material for its latest recording, Good Together, as a group exercise. “This is the first time we sat in a room with blank pages and computers, all together, at the same time,” Bermiss says.

In early 2023, the band’s members met up at Calabrese’s home studio in Vermont and spent nearly a week generating new songs, catalyzing the process with the help of a 20-sided die, a remnant of Zoom-based Dungeons & Dragons matches during lockdown.

“That would give the chords, tempo, and we’d play and it would lead into something. If it works, great. If not, it was a fun experiment,” Bermiss says, likening it to “sort of a delightful chaos.”

And it did work, at least sometimes. Bermiss says some of the songs on the new album were derived directly from those experiments. He says songwriting in general is more art than science, so anything that starts it off is fair game—but there are no guarantees.

“The big secret of songwriting is most of what you write turns out to be garbage. Ten to 20 percent is worthwhile,” he says. “The hardest part for me is starting.” Hence the use of the die.

For Bermiss, the key is a strong melody. “That’s front and center, what stays in the brain, the earworm of it all. I tend to have some words and a melody. The point of writing collectively is you have to let some ego go, welcome whatever people bring. It’s a trust exercise.”

Singing Together

Bermiss’ foray into music was unexpected, by both his family and himself. He comes from a line of scholars and was attending a technical high school as a computer major when he chose to go a different direction.

“Everyone else was in STEM. I was on that track when I realized I wanted to sing,” says Bermiss. He decided he wanted to learn to play an instrument and chose piano as he thought it would provide a solid grounding in theory as well as providing playing possibilities.

College piano lessons led to doing some gigging around the city, doing some arranging, and working as a backup musician. Then Lake Street Dive came calling.

Bermiss is excited to take the new record out on the road. “We did a lot of stuff in the studio, now we’re gonna try it live, let it move through. There’s lots of harmony, synths, lots of percussion,” he says.

Though Price is typically out front, Bermiss also sings lead, while the rest of the band provides additional backing vocals and harmonies. He says putting five voices together on top of the instrumental music gives it a richness he really enjoys. “There’s nothing cooler than a bunch of people singing together. That’s a bridge through genres.”

Lake Street Dive performs at Interlochen Center for the Arts July 10. For tickets, go to interlochen.org.