Dive in

Lake Street Dive continues conjuring new spells.

For its latest release, Good Together, the veteran soul-jazz-pop quintet used the positive sorcery of fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons to kick-start the writing process.

With a 20-sided die used in the role-playing game, band members took turns rolling to determine how a song would be constructed.

Roll 1 was the tempo of the song. Roll 2 determined what four chords would be used. The third roll set the meter.

Band members were then each given an hour to go off and write a melody and lyrics, says bassist-songwriter Bridget Kearney over the phone from Sacramento, Calif.

“It got us out of some of our habits,” Kearney says. “The tempo and meter things were really random and we found some new places to go by leaving that element to chance. With the meter we still had some flexibility — like, I know I have to write in 3/4, but will it be a waltzy 3/4 or have more of a driving backbeat?”

Sometimes, the most difficult things to shoehorn in a song were the chords where rolls would mix major and minor chords that weren’t on the same scale, leading to plenty of interesting compositions.

But for Kearney, it was like being back in school and completing assignments at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where the band formed 21 years ago.

“Coming up and going to music school together, we like doing assignments. It’s like getting a homework assignment: come back with a song in 7/4 meter at 90 beats per minute,” Kearney says.

The D&D die idea gestated during the pandemic, when some members of the group got into the game, playing with other musicians over Zoom.

Three of the songs from that exercise — Good Together, Far Gone and Walking Uphill — made it onto the group’s eighth album, which was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Traditional Pop Vocal category, ultimately won by Norah Jones.

It was the band’s first Grammy nomination and first without founding guitarist/trumpet player Mike (McDuck) Olson, who left amicably in 2021. It was Olson who named the group after the sketchy bars his saxophonist uncle would play on Lake Street in Minneapolis back in the day.

Olson also had a hand in coming up with the original concept of Lake Street Dive as a “free country” band, performing avant-garde country music with elements of skronky jazz thrown in, such as out-of-time chromatic trumpet solos between the verses and other out-of-place musical ideas incorporated into a traditional country sound.

It didn’t work, Kearney says.

“We did that with some trial and error and it was not great — at least, our version was not sounding good to us or our audience,” she says with a laugh.

The group kept honing its material, eventually morphing over the years into a tight, genre-spanning band based in soul and pop with touches of funk, R&B and jazz.

Its first album was recorded and released thanks to the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, which Kearney won in the jazz category in 2005 for her song Sometimes When I’m Drunk and You’re Wearing My Favorite Shirt, performed by the band.

The contest prize delivered US$1,000 in cash and provided for the recording of 1,000 CDs, so Lake Street Dive released its debut album In This Episode… in 2006 and hit the road, first playing all those dive bars it was named after before working up to festivals and theatres.

The group went viral in 2012 when, while promoting a covers EP, it performed the Jackson 5’s I Want You Back on a Boston sidewalk.

A video of that performance was posted online and tweeted about by actor-musician Kevin Bacon, earning the band an expanded fanbase and almost eight million YouTube views.

Their increasing popularity didn’t mean the band — Kearney, vocalist Rachael Price, drummer Mike Calabrese, keyboardist Akie Bermiss and guitarist James Cornelison — stopped pulling any lyrical punches, with social and feminist issues sharing space with feel-good party anthems and romantic ballads.

“I think music is a way we speak to one another. It’s a conversation between us and the listener and songs have spoken to me on that level. It’s a powerful way to speak, so it’s just become something that is in the conversation for me,” says the 40-year-old songwriter.

When Kearney was younger, she wrote more about her personal and romantic life because that’s what occupied her thoughts and emotions at the time, she says.

As her life evolved, so too has her songwriting.

“Now when I’m having a cup of coffee with my best friend, we talk about what’s going on in the news, so that’s what’s important to me, and the passions and things in my life that I care about that I didn’t care that much about before have changed,” she says.

In addition to her duties in Lake Street Dive, the Iowa City-raised, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Kearney has a solo career, with three full-length albums to her name. She has taught music and songwriting classes and performs with a host of other musicians; the groups Bella White and Joy Kills Sorrow brought her to the Winnipeg Folk Festival, while Lake Street Dive last performed at Birds Hill Park in 2013.

This weekend, the band is the final musical act Sunday on the mainstage before the finale.

“I love the Winnipeg Folk Festival,” Kearney says.

“I had the best time. The setup of the festival is perfect, the collaborations between artists are fun to watch and be a part of and the lineup is always so great.”

rob.williams@freepress.mb.ca