Concerts

Take a dive into Lake Street Dive at Roadrunner

The Boston-born band plays Roadrunner on New Year's Eve.

Lake Street Dive comes to Boston on the last night of the year. Dayton.com.

3 minutes to read

Lake Street Dive is good at doing it all. Original members Rachael Price, Mike “McDuck” Olson, Bridget Kearney, and Mike Calabrese met at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where Olson brought them together and named the band after a street with many dive bars in his native Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the last 12 years, they’ve released five albums and two EPs, most recently a covers EP called “Fun Machine: The Sequel” (second to their 2012 EP “Fun Machine”), which came out in September, a decade after the original.

That group is heading out on tour at the very end of this year that brings them to cities across the country in January and February. They go first to New Haven and then come to Boston on Dec. 31, the last night of 2022. They’ll be at Roadrunner with openers Devon Gilfillian and Huntertones.

Originally a group of four, Lake Street Dive became a fivesome when their touring keyboardist Akie Bermiss joined in 2017. Olson then left the band in 2021 and was replaced on guitar by James Cornelison the same year. The split was amicable, with the band on Facebook calling Olson “friend, leader, listener, dreamer, thinker, schemer, supporter, agitator, composer of both silly and heart-searing songs, performer of tasty guitar parts and blistering trumpet solos, arranger of background vocals, cutter of steaks and all time number one all star of waxing philosophically for hours on end to get us through late night drives in the van.”

The band shares writing and arrangement duties among the five of them, and their wide-ranging tastes come through, with elements of pop, rock, R&B, and jazz in their music. Despite this diversity of influence, they retain a cohesive sound that has shifted only slightly over their long career. Their most recent full-length album, “Obviously,” from 2021, was produced by Mike Elizondo, who has collaborated on songs with Dr. Dre, Eminem, and 50 Cent, but has also produced albums for Fiona Apple, Mary J. Blige, and Carrie Underwood. This jack-of-all-trades quality is likely why Lake Street Dive was drawn to him as a producer, and why “Obviously” works so well as a record, certainly one of their best.

Price, the lead singer of the band, said they were drawn to Elizondo for the way he approaches music, which is that “there is no such thing as genres.”

“We don’t ever feel like any genre suits our music, and we don’t want to play a specific genre of music. We just want to write songs that we like that feel good that come from our hearts,” she said in an interview with Variety from March 2021.

She said they were struck by his versatility, having worked on hip-hop, but also a Fiona Apple album, and with numerous bands. He was instrumental in creating “Sarah,” a beautiful a capella group effort track that comes second to last on the album and is unique for a band that otherwise uses a lot of instruments.

Their newest EP, “Fun Machine: The Sequel,” is their second set of covers and they do it as well as they did the first time in 2012. Of the set of songs, they said, “Imagine you walk into your favorite local dive bar and Lake Street Dive is on stage, doing our regular weekly gig for $5 a head. These are the songs we’d be covering there and how we’d be playing them. Some deep cuts, some sentimental favorites and some (hopefully) epic crowd pleasers.”

On this EP, too, they span a range of genres, keeping to the philosophy they use when creating original music. Price said in the Variety interview that she thinks that’s where their success comes from.

“We haven’t tried to align ourselves. We’ve just sort of let it be what it is and we’ve been ourselves — and we’ve been ourselves playing R&B songs or playing rock tunes. That combination, I think, has inevitably created a sound that isn’t really one thing in particular.”