Lake Street Dive has “trouble” defining what their sound is. But as they headline Levitate Music and Arts Festival, it’s not actually a problem at all.
In fact, it’s what helps set them apart, keyboardist Akie Bermiss told MassLive at the festival Saturday.
“We’re pretty difficult to categorize, but that allows us to be in a lot of different categories,” he said.
That said, the band finds its strength in its crossbred sound that incorporates the elements of soul, folk, jazz, classic pop. After first playing Levitate in 2018, Bermiss said coming back as a headliner “seems surreal.”
Lake Street Dive’s Levitate performance follows the release of the band’s eighth studio album “Good Together,” which dropped on June 21. The album marks the first time the band has “worked together in the earliest and most vulnerable stages of songwriting,” Lake Street Dive’s biography reads.
Instead of writing songs sporadically on the road, the group got together at drummer/background vocalist Mike Calabrese’s house in Vermont to put the album together from scratch.
“That was a new thing,” Bermiss said.
The group also wrote songs collaboratively as opposed to members writing songs individually or in pairs and then bringing them back to the whole band.
“We threw a lot of stuff at the wall,” Bermiss said. “We wrote a lot of stuff. Most of it is terrible. But some of it made the record.”
Lake Street Dive was formed by Rachael Price, Mike “McDuck” Olson, Bridget Kearney and Calabrese in 2004.
The group’s founding members all met while studying at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, according to a 2014 article from The Boston Globe.
While Bermiss didn’t join the band until 2017, the musician knew some of the band members beforehand from playing gigs around New York City. Around the same time Bermiss joined Lake Street Dive, the band was on a “meteoric rise,” he said.
Lake Street Dive had already made appearances on the Billboard 200 chart with “Bad Self Portraits” peaking at No. 18 in 2014 and “Side Pony” at No. 29 in 2016. However, it was the band’s viral cover of “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5, shot on a street in Brighton, that led to more gigs and exposure.
The video was originally posted in 2012, but got a new life in 2014 after it was posted to Reddit, according to the Boston Globe. The video has been viewed more than 7 million times to date.
Since then, Lake Street Dive has appeared on several television shows including “The Colbert Report,” “The Late Show with David Letterman,” “Conan,” and “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” Aside from having an almost unidentifiable sound, Bermiss credits the band’s success to their “beautiful, chaotic democracy.”
“There’s like this great melange that comes from us trying to work together,” he said about Lake Street Dive’s uniqueness. “We’re kind of living in a weird ‘90s sitcom, living together on the road. And I think that’s part of it.”
The 11th annual Levitate Music and Arts Festival is happening at the Marshfield Fairgrounds in Marshfield from Friday, July 5 to Sunday, July 7. Lake Street Dive performs at 8:15 p.m. Saturday at the Stoke Stage. More information about the festival can be found online.
