Lake Street Dive closes out Good Together tour with a three-show stop at The Eastern

The first time Lake Street Dive played in Atlanta—if lead singer Rachael Price’s memory serves correctly—drummer Mike Calabrese attempted to chat up a Star Bar staff member before the show. She rejected him and left the bar, after which Calabrese dedicated a vengeful song to her onstage. “But one of her coworkers texted her about what was happening, and she came back!” Price told the crowd at Lake Street Dive’s show this Thursday. “The whole audience immediately knew who she was, and it got incredibly quiet and awkward. It’s amazing we didn’t get chased out of Atlanta for good!”

Photograph by Perry Julien

Photograph by Perry Julien

Photograph by Perry Julien

Luckily for Lake Street Dive—and for Atlanta—the band’s been welcomed back many times in the decade since. This weekend, they are playing a three-night set at The Eastern, the final stop on their national tour for their 2024 album, Good Together. Thursday’s show delivered on everything Lake Street Dive fans have come to expect over the years: Price’s bright vocals are as dazzling as ever, bassist Bridget Kearney is still turning her upright into a get-down jam machine, and five minutes is enough time to convey just how much this group still loves each other. That’s no small feat for a bunch of freakishly talented musicians, most of whom met in college twenty years ago.

Photograph by Perry Julien

Photograph by Perry Julien

Photograph by Perry Julien

Photograph by Perry Julien

Photograph by Perry Julien

Watching them take the stage, I found myself imagining Lake Street Dive as an incognito lounge singer act in some crowded, ritzy restaurant. The modern art-deco set, with its illuminated arch and emerald velveteen bar in the middle, could certainly have played the part. So could the band, who emerged from a set of curtains in stylish, color-coordinated outfits, Price gliding to the front in a satiny pink dress. How long, I wondered, would it take a crowd, distracted by martinis and oysters Rockefeller, to realize that this lounge singer and her musicians were incapable of creating background music? To see Lake Street Dive play live is to be pulled in by all your senses.

Since they popped onto the scene with their first studio album, 2009’s self-titled Lake Street Dive, followed by a bigger hit, 2014’s Bad Self-Portrait, the band has steadily earned its place as one of the most inventive, inspired bands of its generation. Never limited by genre, they’ve managed to twirl the threads of pop, jazz, and funk into a sound that is at once instantly recognizable and appealing to a wide range of listeners. Six albums later, they’ve evolved in character and composition—keyboardist Akie Bermiss joined in 2017, while guitarist James Cornelison replaced original member Mike Olson—but the chemistry that made them so much fun then is very much alive now. Good Together, one of their best albums yet, achieves a glossier, more professional sound without abandoning the self-effacing quirk that has always made Lake Street Dive so lovable.

Photograph by Perry Julien

Photograph by Perry Julien

Photograph by Perry Julien

Their years as students at Boston Conservatory of Music may be far behind them, but somehow these musicians have never quite outgrown a certain all-elbows-and-knees quality; it’s not hard to imagine them crowded into a ratty college apartment living room, going absolutely ham on a Stevie Wonder cover. The effect is heightened by Price herself, whose voice could bring down a million-seat house, but who swivels her hips more like a former ballerina than a pop star. It’s not what you would call sexy, maybe, but the combination is completely irresistible, like an angel with freckles in all the wrong places. I’d pay to watch Price sing to herself on the Subway; who wouldn’t?

Photograph by Perry Julien

Photograph by Perry Julien

In a sweet, full-circle gesture, Lake Street Dive invited Tiny Habits to open for them—a band that also formed in college in Boston, albeit twenty years later. They played a charming set full of fluttery harmonies, punctuated by the song “Hemenway,” a nostalgic ode to their years in Boston. Barely out of music school, they evince the same deep wells of talent that have sustained Lake Street Dive all these years and the same shared delight in making music with each other. That alchemy has kept us all coming back to see Lake Street Dive go ham onstage together for the last two decades, and we’ll surely keep doing it for as long as they’ll have us.

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