Support: James Tutson and The Rollback
Lake Street Dive will release Free Yourself Up, its
second album with Nonesuch Records on May 4. The band -- drummer Michael
Calabrese, bassist Bridget Kearney, singer Rachael Price, and guitarist/ trumpeter
Michael "McDuck" Olson - - self-produced the album at Goosehead
Palace Studios in Nashville with engineer Dan Knobler. Lake Street Dive formed
in 2004 while students at New England Conservatory and have been touring
non-stop ever since, growing from basement venues like The Lizard Lounge in
Boston, MA to selling out Radio City Music Hall in New York City.
For this album, the quartet drafted touring keyboardist
Akie Bermiss to join them in the studio. Adding another player to the process
freed up the band members to explore a wider range of instrumental textures,
construct more full-bodied arrangements, and build on their well-known
background harmonies. "This album is based in the realities in our
time," Kearney reflects, "which have inevitably become part of
everyone's daily life. It's something you think about and obsess over -- and
write songs about. Free Yourself Up is about empowering yourself, emboldening
yourself, no matter what's going wrong.”