Piercing pop
Lake Street Dive goes deep with new album
You'll be forgiven if it takes you a minute to notice Lake Street Dive filled its upcoming album, “Free Yourself Up” (out May 4), with modern angst. The LP begins with so much life — lead singer Rachael Price sounds like Diana Ross doing disco, intergalactic funk and new jack swing all at once on the opening track, “Baby Don't Leave Me Alone With My Thoughts.” But listen to the lyrics, written by bassist Bridget Kearney, and you'll realize that sweet groove is fraught with contemporary troubles.
When you get beyond her stunning voice, you'll notice Price's first words are “Hard times, hard times.” (She goes on to lament, “An old man has his little hands on the button/Feels like nothing anyone can do.”) Each band member — Price, Kearney, Mike “McDuck” Olson on trumpet and guitar and Mike Calabrese on drums — contributes moments like this to what is otherwise a buoyant pop album.
“The record introduces the time and place pretty quickly with that `Hard times, hard times' lyric,” Kearney said ahead of the band's sold-out Sinclair show next week.
“I like that we have started writing about what's going on in the world today and that we open with a kind of thesis statement for the record.”
The band, which came together just over a decade ago at the New England Conservatory of Music, doesn't just spend time in the tough present but add touches of nostalgia. Another ace Kearney lyric comes in “Dude” with, “We used to kick it like Joe and Obama/ Now you just leave me at home playing mommy.”
“I was psyched about that because McDuck, who cowrote the song with me, was a huge fan of the Obama and Biden bromance,” she said. “But I also like that the line recalls a different time not so long ago.”
If you're looking for pure pop escapism, all you need to do is ignore the lyrics. Forget politics and heartbreak and relax into the record's grooves. With nods to Motown and Stax, '70s soul and '80s Top 40, the creative songwriting embraces simple pop and complex melodic turns.
“We took this leap of faith in producing the record ourselves,” Kearney said. “In the past, maybe we felt with an outside producer, we could always hold someone else responsible if things went wrong. It turns out we worked really well together.”
Last spring, band members did an experimental recording session to test the idea of producing themselves. They dug it and began writing more collaboratively, taking more sonic risks. Kearney points to her collaboration with Olson on “Dude” as a song she would have never written on her own.
“Putting two people's styles together really opened up the process for us,” she said. “And it started changing how I wrote songs on my own. `Good Kisser' has this very strange form. It's something I don't think I would have done on my own before we started collaborating as songwriters.”
There's a lot to unpack with “Free Yourself Up”: modern politics and love gone wrong, straight-ahead pop and elaborate arrangements. Lake Street Dive members know this, so they'll return to their hometown and help fans figure it all out with bigger shows this summer and fall. They play the Levitate Festival in Marshfield in July and the Wang in November.
“We wanted to start the tour in Boston at the Sinclair first because, honestly, we made the album quickly, and we are still learning how to play the songs,” Kearney said, then laughed. “We needed some smaller shows at the beginning to give us some confidence.”