Q&A by Natalie Rogers
With the Port Fairy Folk Festival fast approaching we’ve searched the globe to bring you an all access pass to the hottest new acts on this years bill. Brooklyn based quartet Lake Street Dive is proving to be one of the hottest tickets in town. I chatted with double bass player/backing singer Bridget Kearney to get the skinny on what punters can expect.
Hey Bridget, let’s get into it! Please introduce the cool cats of Lake Street Dive.
The other members are Rachael Price, our lead singer, Mike “McDuck” Olson, who plays guitar and trumpet (and sings background vocals) and Mike Calabrese, the drummer (who also sings background vocals).
I believe you all met and formed while studying at the New England Conservatory of Music, what were those initial gigs like? With so many musicians/bands on the scene was it difficult to get noticed at first?
Yes, we started playing together in 2004 at the end of our first year at the New England Conservatory. Our first gigs were at a pan-Asian restaurant and a bubble tea joint. They were low key, to say the least! There are a million bands in Boston and many of them are student bands who will play for nothing, so it did take some time to establish ourselves in any type of professional way. But I think those years were a blessing in the end because it gave us some time to figure out what we really wanted to do musically and the fact that we weren’t making money at it, (probably for the first five years even) meant that we’ve always been a music-first kind of band. You never have to worry about us making music decisions for the sake of money.
The band name is tribute to your humble beginnings playing dive bars around Boston, almost 10 years on no doubt the venues have improved but how has your sound evolved?
The first couple of years that we were a band, our sound was pretty strange! We were writing songs for the first time and taking any and all influences, including an avant garde jazz sound, that was popular at our school at the time, and throwing them all together without too much restraint. Eventually we started figuring out which of these many stylistic elements really resonated with us and suited the band well. Coming out of this ocean of possibilities we realized we like, for example, playing with a back beat! Making music you can shake your hips to! Leaving a lot of space in the music for Rachael’s incredible voice to really be heard, with all of its nuances. Slathering all of our music with background vocals! Standing where we are now, it feels settling to have some sense of those foundations, and we’re starting to enter another phase of experimentation. We are starting to cast that net out there again and see what else we can bring in to incorporate as part of our sound. It’s fun to try a lot of things that don’t work and then eventually you hit on some revelation and say, ‘Wow, I can’t believe we never thought of this before!’
You’re spending a little over three weeks in our fair country, what’s on the top of the ‘to-do’ list on your days off?
People keep telling me Byron Bay is a really special place, I’d love to get there if possible. Rachael’s family hails from a farm outside of Perth, so we hope to get down to her ancestral home at some point! I wanna see some kangaroos!
When & Where: SummerSalt Festival, Melbourne – February 21 & Port Fairy Folk Music Festival – March 6-9
