9/14/24: Lake Street Dive Conquers MSG

As the band's Rachael Price shouted, in triumph and relief at the thunderous applause, "You only play Madison Square Garden for the first time once!"

Working on an article for Stereophile Magazine’s March 2023 issue, I spoke to the record producer Dan Knobler, who’d just produced and engineered an album featuring the singer Rachael Price.¹ Since Stereophile is a magazine with a strong technology bent, I asked Knobler about the technical challenges of recording Price. There were very few, he said: essentially, positioning Price’s microphone “and getting out of the way. Rachael Price is a world-class singer. You’d have to work hard to make her sound bad.”

Price, 39, the lead singer and frontwoman for the multi-genre but essentially rock quintet Lake Street Dive, which last Saturday reached a significant milestone—playing, and packing, the 20,000-seat Madison Square Garden—has a gorgeously warm alto with which she can do anything she wants, using every gesture at her command—shrugs, grimaces, clenched fists, tightly shut eyes—to pull the notes out of herself. Price’s sonic palette is broader, arguably, than that of any other rock singer today. However one classifies Price—she once characterized herself to me as at heart a jazz, not rock, singer—this is one of contemporary pop’s great vocalists. She’s also unstoppably ebullient and a naturally gifted mover—I referred in Stereophile to her “wicked onstage shimmy.” It’s impossible to see/hear Rachael Price in concert and not be lifted out of your seat, as we thousands were for the better part of Saturday night.

Although Ms. Price easily shoulders her frontperson’s load, she is surrounded by the similarly gifted. Lake Street Dive, which came together in Boston in 2004, its four founding members all students at the New England Conservatory of Music, has an embarrassment of riches. Mike Calabrese, the only drummer the band has ever had (Price and bassist Bridget Kearney were also present at the creation) is a first-rate pop/funk drummer. He was beautifully miked on Saturday, his bass drum- and tom-tom hits thunderous but sharply defined. While remaining tightly focused, Calabrese is all over the place; as with Price’s voice, there aren’t many things he can’t do with his hands and feet. He provides the perfect foundation, simultaneously rock-solid and syncopated.

And augmented by Kearney, the band’s third crucial member and the very rare acoustic bass player in a rock band. (God knows what engineering magic is making it possible for the woody sound of a double bass to cut through the noise generated by a loud rock band.) In earlier days, Kearney played her stand-up bass most of the time; she now spends almost as much time on an electric instrument. If they started out as an eccentric, unclassifiable aggregate, “a young jazz band trying to sound weird,” as Price puts it,² Lake Street Dive is a rock band now. A quintet, its remaining members keyboardist Akie Bermiss and guitarist James Cornelison.

If the band is inconceivable without Price’s voice and effervescence (“I had a large personality as a child,” she once told a reporter), its rise to prominence was sparked by Kearney. When the band was scuffling, it was her inspiration to turn the Jackson 5’s first, 1969, hit, “I Want You Back,” with its irresistible descending bass line, into a sinuous, slowly unfolding piece of jazz-pop. A YouTube video they shot of it on a Cambridge, MA streetcorner in 2012 went viral, and the band was off and running. Its 2014 album, Bad Self Portraits, went to #18 on Billboard’s Top 200, followed by 2018’s Free Yourself Up, which soared to #8.

Kearney is also Lake Street Dive’s most gifted songwriter. Of the group’s signature songs—“Good Kisser” (last night’s, and most nights’, encore), “You Go Down Smooth,” “Neighbor Song,” “Side Pony,” “Baby Don’t Leave Me Alone With My Thoughts,” “Hypotheticals,” “Being a Woman,” and “Nobody’s Stopping You Now” (co-written with Price), all but “You Go Down Smooth,” which the band’s now-departed trumpeter/guitarist Mike “McDuck”Olson wrote, are Kearney’s work.

Which raises a subject of some concern. When they put together the new, let’s call it sixth, studio album (there are a few early quasi-releases), 2024’s Good Together, the members chose to adopt the writing-by-committee method, a practice which, as far as I can tell, originated in Nashville of the late Eighties and the ‘90s, and which, while undoubtedly more efficient than an anguished single songwriter ripping a sung from his guts, I consider detrimental to the creation of memorable songs. Five co-writers—or, increasingly, more—are likely to come up with an insubstantial piece of patchwork, one contribution from here, another from there. Such, at least, is the case with Good Together, which contains only one song for the ages, “25,” with a heart-breaking, chills-inducing vocal by Price. While “25” is going to be in the band’s repertoire for years to come, one is hard-pressed to say the same of the album’s other songs. (The title track is catchy, with Akie Bermiss gamely sharing Price’s vocals. I don’t envy him, even if she obligingly reins herself in. Price, if it isn’t clear by now, is a team player.)

Two sides of Lake Street Dive— Above: Rachael Price singing the new album’s best song.

Below: The night before the MSG concert, the band ended the show with “You Go Down Smooth”

I have another concern. To my unease, the producer/songwriter/engineer/ bassist/keyboardist and high-level label executive Mike Elizondo produced the band’s two most recent albums, 2021’s Obviously and Good Together. I fear Mike Elizondo as Hemingway’s Old Man feared the Tigers of Detroit and the Indians of Cleveland. To my eyes, this individual, who came up as the hip-hop superstar Dr. Dre’s disciple and has since broadened his scope and deepened his power tremendously (he was appointed Warner Records’ Senior VP of A&R and Staff Producer in 2011) is a superbly trained, highly intelligent industry creature whose job is to go where he is summoned and apply enough gloss and sheen to a record to put it over commercially. Elizondo co-wrote Eminem’s breakthrough hit “The Real Slim Shady” and wrote or co-wrote 17 songs on three other Eminem albums. He co-wrote Carrie Underwood’s #1 pop hit “Cowboy Casanova” and co-wrote and co-produced much of 50 Cent’s album Get Rich or Die Trying, including the huge hit “In da Club.” Elizondo generally co-writes and co-produces rather than wholly oversees a project: he’s a Mr. Fixit, not an auteur. An auteur has a vision, Mike Elizondo has none. Yes, he has worked with quality artists—he brought Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine back from the dead in 2005, co-produced the gifted newcomer Madison Cunningham’s 2023 Grammy-winner Revealer (although Cunningham’s true mentor and brainy guide is the producer Tyler Chester), and music-directed the Americana-rich radio show Live From Here. But these are the exceptions. The rule are Gwen Stefani, Mary J. Blige, the Jonas Brothers, Pink, Ed Sheeran, Twenty-One Pilots, etc. A list of Elizondo’s commercial triumphs could fill the next 20 lines. Ironically, he hasn’t done a very good job, sales-wise, with Lake Street Dive. Obviously peaked at #69 on Billboard’s Top 200 and Good Together has failed to make the chart altogether. Maybe their sound is Elizondo-resistant. In short, I trust Mike Elizondo as far as I can throw him. Rachael and Bridget & Co, maintain your integrity. I know you will.

While keeping these cavils in mind, I’ll conclude that we 20,000 poured out of the Garden on Saturday night in a universally buoyant frame of mind, largely but by no means entirely courtesy of the great Rachael Price. This is an extraordinary singer, working with one of the best, for lack of a better hyphenate, Americana-rock bands out there. They’re been growing, and improving, for 20 years; let’s hope that the erstwhile “young jazz band trying to sound weird” forges a path as a middle-aged rock band that will bring tremendous pleasure to bigger and bigger audiences for years to come. As Price says, “We’ve been trying to get less and less weird. We’ve just been doing it so slowly.”

1. The album was I Love a Love Song!, the second collaboration between Price and the cabaret-style songwriter/guitarist Vilray Bolles.

2. In its earlier years, the trumpeter/guitarist Mike Olson was the band’s nominal leader and guiding spirit. This writer, for one, prefers the band’s current, rock, sound to the neither-rock-nor-jazz feel that Olsen gave it. It still doesn’t really have a genre; neither does it have the somewhat off-putting eccentricity of the Olson years.