By Web Behrens
A funny thing happened the day before I spoke to Mike Calabrese on the phone: I found out we’ve only got two degrees of separation.
As I dug into his biography in advance of our phone chat, it was no shock to learn that the Lake Street Dive drummer and co-founder’s musical roots stretch all the way back into his childhood. But serendipitously hearing a firsthand account about a moment of memorable artistry from someone’s youth? That’s gold. In many years of interviewing musicians, actors, artists, and authors, I’ve never stumbled across such an anecdote from a personal friend who also knows my interview subject.
My buddy—as it happens, another Michael—celebrated his post-doctoral freedom with a summer road trip around the country. We met up during his Chicago stop, and when I told him I’d be writing about Lake Street Dive for their return to Ravinia on August 26, his eyes lit up. Believe it or not, the two Mikes went to high school together in the Philadelphia suburb of Marple Township, PA.
My Mike described a performance by Calabrese in the school talent show that made a lasting impression. Already demonstrating a keen sense for percussion and a flair for showmanship, teenage Calabrese unfurled a deconstructed act: He tore into a drum solo while someone else came on stage and, piece by piece, slowly removed his drum set. “It has stuck with me for 17 years,” my friend told me with a grin. Naturally, I couldn’t resist sharing the story with Calabrese, who responded with a hearty laugh.
“There’s nothing I love more than making an impression on someone,” he says. “I’m surprised he remembers that! I look back on that with a bit of embarrassment, personally, because it’s sooo very dramatic. But clearly it worked!”
Later in our conversation, Calabrese mused about his teenage self, lessons learned, and his musical evolution. “I was actually pretty cocksure, as many 16- or 17-year-olds could be,” he says. (Presumably it was the good kind of assuredness, the kind that leads one to take artistic risks, like holding the stage with a vanishing drum kit!) “I was a big fish, musically speaking, back in the day. Eventually, through fear and insecurity, I lost a little bit of what younger Mike had. Looking back, I think I wasted a lot of time trying to be something I didn’t need to be.”
Lake Street Dive vocalist Rachael Price and drummer Mike Calabrese at Ravinia in 2019
The reflection came from a question inspired by a track on Lake Street Dive’s latest album, the pop-jazz-R&B whirlwind Obviously. In “Nobody’s Stopping You Now,” a ballad written by Rachael Price and Bridget Kearney, who constitute half of the band, the women offer advice to themselves as teenagers. The song provides a great springboard to self-reflection: What advice would you give your younger self? (“I probably would tell myself to practice more,” Calabrese adds with a chuckle.)
But there’s more than one angle to such a deep song, which Price and Kearney wrote in 2019. Two years later, a listener will probably find a whole new layer of meaning to one of the verses:
Lay down girl and rest your weary head
I know you’ll make it through somehow
Dip your toes down deep into the riverbed
’Cause nobody’s stopping you now
As with every other track on Obviously, this was written and recorded before COVID occupied any space in our collective consciousness, yet it aptly describes where the band is today. They’ve emerged on the other side, maintaining the group’s upward trajectory, even as everything changes, including their own lineup.
Although the intended 2020 release of the new album by Nonesuch Records became one of the pandemic’s countless casualties, Lake Street Dive burst into the nation’s gradual reopening with fervor, making spring appearances (still from the safety of a remote studio) on everything from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to The Ellen DeGeneres Show to NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts. Meanwhile, their album and the first single made a splash on the Billboard charts, hitting career highs for the band. For longtime fans and new converts alike, Obviously provides the upbeat medicine that this moment calls for.
Lake Street Dive’s latest album, Obviously, recorded what was ultimately a brief moment in the band’s life, with the then quintet now returned to a foursome, with drummer Mike Calabrese, bassist Bridget Kearney, lead vocalist Rachael Price, and keyboardist Akie Bermiss (left to right).
In a word, it feels “awesome,” says Calabrese—especially because they recorded it in early 2020 in Nashville, finishing the album and returning home just five days before lockdowns hit. “We got it in just under the wire,” he continues. “To then have to sit on it for so long was maddening. But once we did [release it, in March 2021], it did its thing with flying colors.”
Everybody’s got stories about how their life was turned upside down by the pandemic. For Calabrese, the whiplash between the end of 2019 and summer of 2021 was severe, impacting his life in ways both personal and professional. Married with one child already, Calabrese and his wife now have a new arrival, their “little COVID baby” born earlier this year. “There wasn’t really much else going on!” he says with a self-deprecating laugh.
Still, you know the old saying about beginnings and endings. While the pandemic spurred new life—literally, in the Calabrese household—it also marks the end of one Lake Street Dive era: One of the band’s four original members, Mike “McDuck” Olson, announced his departure this spring, then performed his farewell sets at a few live shows in early June, before the full tour for Obviously kicked in.
In part, the change was perhaps inevitable. As Calabrese points out, McDuck “was the first member of the band to get married and have two kids. Those kids are school age now. For someone who’s been an introvert his whole life, he never expected this silly band he started 17 years ago to get as big as it did, you know?”
But COVID factored heavily into the change. “The pandemic hit every facet of life. I can’t separate it from any decision I made in the last year, however big or small,” Calabrese explains. Back in 2019, “we thought we’d tour on this record, then take a few years off. That was the original plan, to do a hiatus thing after Obviously. That got delayed and delayed and delayed. The combination of that, raising kids, and getting through a pandemic—and knowing, once it lifted, we’d have to get right back to work to pay our mortgages and rent—it was daunting. In a lot of ways, it’s the perfect time for him to get out. We’re all very supportive of his decision.”
And with that, the band is a quartet again. The founding members—Calabrese on drums, McDuck on guitar and trumpet, Kearney on bass, and Price as lead vocalist—first came together in 2004 in Boston, while attending the New England Conservatory of Music. (Years later, they added a fifth member, Akie Bermiss, in a story with a fun Chicago connection; more on that momentarily.) “Lake Street Dive was basically just an extension of extracurricular activity. That was our garage band in college,” Calabrese says. “We’d put my crappy drum set in the trunk of our car and drive to a boba-tea joint to play songs for three hours for free tea.”
Flash forward nearly a decade, and the foursome was still jamming together, although some of the members were also in other bands. Still, because Lake Street Dive had started to amass a following, they decided to really go for it. “We figured, if it’s ever gonna happen, we have to fully commit,” Calabrese says. “Which is a good lesson for anything in life, really.”
One way to garner extra ears is to lure listeners with cover songs. So they recorded Fun Machine, an EP featuring their takes on beloved pop tunes, including “Faith” by George Michael and “Rich Girl” by Daryl Hall and John Oates. The strategy proved to be their tipping point into much broader success, thanks in particular to their acoustic, bluesy cover of “I Want You Back.” Reinventing the irresistible Jackson 5 hit, Lake Street Dive introduced themselves to the masses via a simple video: Just the four of them performing on the sidewalk in Boston, bathed in sunlight, their tight-as-a-tick harmonies accompanied by upright bass and a mournful trumpet. (To date, it’s notched 6.7 million YouTube views.) That sudden surge in popularity fueled a tour, not to mention a brief legal bind—Price was under contract elsewhere, so the group’s original label fronted them the money to buy her out.
“That was the beginning of the modern-day Lake Street Dive,” Calabrese says. “A little bit of internet notoriety, coupled with a sold-out tour across the country. We haven’t stopped since!” He pauses, then adds: “Well, it took a pandemic to stop us.”
“We’re trying to write good songs that
people want to dance to, or at least feel
strongly about. That’s what you want
music to do: to take you somewhere.”
A few years ago, the group added a fifth musician, keyboardist and singer Bermiss. That makes Obviously a particularly precious time capsule in the group’s history, as it’s the only release featuring all five members in the lineup. Bermiss had performed on Free Yourself Up, Lake Street Dive’s sixth studio album, in 2018, but Obviously hits new marks, with Bermiss scoring songwriting credits on more than half the tracks. He also duets with Price on “Same Old News,” which delivers the same style of groove as classic ’70s Roberta Flack–Donny Hathaway tracks.
The fun footnote is that Chicago hosted the pivotal moment in the band’s history when the original four asked Bermiss to officially join them. Calabrese chuckles when he recalls the story. “Yes! We made it super awkward,” he says. “We got rings; we got a card; we took him out to dinner. He’s very gracious, but it was clear, at the time, that he wanted to leap out of his skin. But he accepted, nonetheless. That’s when you know it’s true love: when you embarrass someone and they still want to be with you.”
With each Lake Street Dive member contributing their voices, as onstage at their Ravinia debut in 2019, the Obviously songs include writing from all five for the first (and only) time.
The new dimensions heard on Obviously come not just from Bermiss, but also thanks to producer Mike Elizondo, a Grammy winner who’s worked with everyone from Dr. Dre to Eminem, Fiona Apple to Carrie Underwood. These new layers to Lake Street Dive’s sound don’t make them any easier to pigeonhole; recent reviews tag the new album as “genre transcending,” “era hopping,” and “jazz-pop-whatever.” But that lack of easy labels doesn’t bother Calabrese at all. “You know, genres,” he sighs. “I feel like there weren’t genres before pop music; there was just where a style of music was from. All music was folk music! You could even say that classical music was aristocratic European folk music. What happened in the United States was something completely different. You needed to genre-fy these different kinds of music, to identify it and follow its growth through many different forms.”
So Calabrese’s developed his own lines when describing the sound: “When I talk about the band’s genre, I sometimes say, ‘We’re a pop band from earlier decades.’ More often, I say, ‘We’re a song band.’ We’re trying to write good songs that people want to dance to, or at least feel strongly about.
“That’s what you want music to do: to take you somewhere. Right? All we’ve been doing our entire career is to try to write the songs we want to listen to. We want to write songs that would make our musical ancestors proud. That’s the idea!” ■
Native Chicagoan Web Behrens has spent most of his journalism career covering arts and culture. His work has appeared in the pages of the Chicago Tribune, Time Out Chicago, Time Out New York, Crain’s Chicago Business, Advocate magazine, and Mobil Travel Guides.