When’s the last time you danced with a stranger? Met a pair of eyes across a dance floor, cast any doubts aside and held out your hand? 

Unless your answer is “never,” you know the distinct magic of two strangers making a connection through music—even just for one song. On their new album, Good Together, jazz-soul pop stars Lake Street Dive explore that powerful connection— and push listeners to bring that same openness to their day-to-day lives. The concept started taking shape at a honky-tonk in a VFW hall in upstate New York. 

It was summer 2023, and Lake Street Dive co-founder, songwriter and bassist Bridget Kearney had locked herself away to wrap up the last songs for the band’s unfinished eighth album. She came up for air and needed to move her thoughts along with her body; a friend brought her to a local weekly square dance. 

“People were there from the city, from the country, all ages, different generations. And I saw how normal it was to just introduce yourself to a stranger and say, ‘Hi, let’s spin around for three minutes— maybe we’ll be friends forever, maybe we’ll never see each other again,’” she remembers a year later. “And I wanted to take that sense of possibility into Lake Street Dive.” 

The next day, she sat down to write “Dance With a Stranger,” a bright, funky, Motown-vibing song with step-by-step lyrics on how to connect. The band finally had its album opener—the perfect, tone-setting tune to introduce Good Together. 

“Our concerts already feel like a community meeting places,” Kearney explains. “But I wanted a moment in the show to say, ‘Look at all of us here together. Let’s get to know each other a little bit better.’”

On the record, “Dance with a Stranger” is infectiously inviting. Lake Street Dive singer Rachael Price lays it all out over some shimmering keys and a bouncing drum beat: “Look around the room/ There are so many people here like you/ People who came here to be together, dance it all away/ Who wanna be good, and love one another.” 

In 2024, the world may feel colder, more brutal and more divided than it has in a while. Pessimists could say that Lake Street Dive are naïve—our existential problems won’t disappear on the dancefloor. And they’re right. But that’s the magic of Good Together; Lake Street Dive has dubbed the album a “joyful rebellion,” a call to “take your joy very seriously.” They know positive soul-pop isn’t going to set the world straight. But two decades into their career, this group of college friends is back to deliver the simplest of messages: amid all the cruelty in the world, try a little tenderness. Connection can be a beautiful act of protest.

***

Tenderness has entered Rachael Price’s life in a big way recently. 

Last year, she gave birth to her first child—her daughter Jupiter, who she calls “the band’s niece.” Jupiter was just a few months old when she joined the band on tour and later in the studio to record Good Together. Just like her mom, Jupiter is growing up immersed in music. These days, she’s especially loving Latin ala Lee, Peggy Lee’s 1960 album of Broadway classics sung with horns and Afro-Cuban percussion. 

“Being on tour with a baby has been such a natural experience,” Price says. “The band is around all day to interact with her; she has this communal support as she’s growing. That’s how we used to raise our babies.” 

Kearney says that Jupiter floating in the band’s orbit has “put everything in perspective for us—whatever is happening with our music, whatever disagreement we might be having.” 

Despite any past disagreements, the members of Lake Street Dive have always shared a unified vision for their music. 

Price, Kearney, Mike Calabrese and Mike “McDuck” Olson met as students at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in the early 2000s. They were academics, serious about their craft and prepping for careers as professional jazz musicians—and they certainly weren’t cutting their teeth in hopes of becoming pop stars.

Price grew up singing jazz, but by the time she met her future bandmates she says that “singing standards began feeling laborious.”

She adds, “There’s this pressure in the jazz world to come up with the most interesting, new arrangement as possible. Like, if it’s not new and fresh, there’s no reason to sing the standards. I was a square, in jazz terms.” 

As the quartet began experimenting together, they felt a push to get weird— otherwise, they’d be disregarded by fellow jazz students. They describe Lake Street Dive’s earliest music not as jazz, but as “avant-garde country.”

“If there was any stigma [about straying from jazz] at the Conservatory, it was about not being adventurous,” Price says. “The push was to make music no one had ever heard before. It took us some time to guide our music to something that was also nice to listen to.” 

With their 2010 self-titled album, Lake Street Dive did just that—focusing in on their bled tight, light, jazz-influenced vocal pop. But with 2014’s Bad Self Portraits, the band zeroed in on the sound that would soon made them famous: Price digging deeper and belting uplifting, sweetly self-aware songs atop stacked harmonies; Calabrese’s popping percussion, McDuck’s soulful trumpet and Kearney’s warm stand-up bass. They stopped trying to make music unlike anything they’d heard and started making music that took cues from things they loved: Motown and Stax classics, jazz standards, rockabilly rave-ups and sweet, soulful ‘70s singer-songwriter cuts. 

Their most popular songs tap into universal hopes and desires—insecurities about love, passionate romances, self-criticism, the search for truth and the ability to maintain one’s reputation as a generous lover. (See 2018 hit “Good Kisser.”)

Once they landed on that sound and message, the band took off. Fans flocked to Price’s crystal-clear sing-alongs. Their music wasn’t feel-good in the vapid, radio pop sense; it actually felt good, deep down in your belly.  

As they began to envision Good Together, the group held one song in the highest esteem: “I’m Just Another Soldier” by The Staple Singers. Lake Street Dive first covered the tune at Mavis Staples’ 80th birthday celebration show at New York’s Apollo Theater in 2019. 

“The song has such a unifying feel, like, ‘Let’s all march together. I’m just another soldier in the army of love.’ There’s humility to the chorus. You’re not the captain or the sergeant or the lieutenant,” Price says. “You’re one person working with others toward this greater goal. It felt so good to play that onstage, so powerful, so magical. And I thought, ‘How can we achieve that feeling?’”

***

For an act that’s continued to develop and grow with each release, Good Together still feels impressively them. That could be due to time. Though Mike “McDuck” Olson left in 2021, Price, Kearney and Calabrese have now been musically connecting for more than 20 years. Newer keyboardist Akie Bermiss and guitarist James Cornelison fit into the fold seamlessly. 

More likely, it’s that Good Together is the first album where this multi-songwriter band actually built their songs together in one room—at one time, from the ground up. The band opened themselves up like never before, putting all vulnerabilities on the table—with the help of 20-sided Dungeons & Dragons dice. 

In February 2023, as Price was entering her third trimester of pregnancy, the band gathered in Calabrese’s home studio in Vermont for a writer’s retreat. There had never been one assigned Lake Street Drive songwriter. Instead, each member would bring their ideas—nearly fleshed out—to band sessions to see what stuck. 

But they crafted Good Together a little differently. They wanted to truly create together. First, they tackled “Help Is on the Way,” a song sketch Price had written about our cultural obsession with self-improvement, offering a practical solution: “Just when I thought I’d hit my limit/ I saw that all of us are here in it/ And I forgot for just one minute, about trying to help myself/ If all of us helping ourselves could help somebody else/ Help is on the way.” 

The band workshopped Price’s idea as a team, building it into a dynamic call to action. 

“The process of self-improvement can get a little bit selfish and inward. So I wanted a song about the pursuit of outward growth, how helping each other can be the best way to help yourself,” Price says. “And we went from there— that was our springboard.” 

Kearney says the song was “us enacting the change we were writing about, working together in a new way.” 

The tune set the tone for their sessions— bucking the trend of isolation to help each other feel and heal.  

“But then we stalled a bit at first; it can be vulnerable and awkward and scary to actually write together. Usually, we get the bad ideas out before presenting them to the band,” Kearney says. “So we got the ball rolling by rolling some dice.”

The band had passed the pandemic by playing the classic role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons on Zoom, and Calabrese brought out the game’s 20-sided die. Each roll dictated the tempo, time signature and chords—then one band member would take 30 minutes to push out some ideas before the band reconvened. 

“Each of us captained a song,” Kearney says. “So Rachael might get 150 beats per minute, ¾ time signature and the specific chords she needed to use. Then she had 30 minute to make something. It pushed us beyond self-doubt and paralysis—get in, get out.” 

The song captains took their half-hour slot to jot down some ideas, then led the full band in writing sessions that pulled songs out of the air. While writing, laughing and hanging with Calabrese’s family for five days, Lake Street Dive connected creatively like they never quite had before, with a feeling of joyful rebellion serving as their guiding light.

“Usually when I’m co-writing in a room, I feel so much social anxiety. Co-writing is all about awkward silences. Is someone else going to have a cool idea? Will I ever have another cool idea again? Have I ever had any cool ideas? There’s a lot of self-doubt,” Kearney says. “But letting the dice decide a few things helped us find a productive way to write together.” 

It’s hard to fathom that the showstopping “Walking Uphill” was the result of a dice roll revealing random chords and tempos. Price spent her 30 minutes flipping through an old journal and stopped on an underlined passage: “I feel like I’m walking uphill.” The sentiment matched her mood that morning—she was nine months pregnant, exhausted, trying to force her brain to write a pop song.  “That was the idea: I was in a rough place, but the work made me feel good. I let the struggle be joyful,” she says. She brought the song’s skeleton back to her band, and together they built an unstoppable anthem, a slow and stomping, guitar-ripping blast: “It feels like I’m walking uphill now/ But I’m on my way/ It’s all getting pretty damn real now/ But I’m on my way.” 

***

By the summer of 2023, most of Good Together’s 11 tracks were written and ready. Jupiter was born, setting the record as Lake Street Dive’s youngest crew member by several decades. Returning from her own solo writing retreat, Kearney brought the band “Dance with a Stranger.” 

Price calls the song “the perfect missing piece of our puzzle.”

She adds, “We needed that song—that’s the song to get people moving.”

The band reconnected with Mike Elizondo—who produced their 2021 album Obviously and has worked with Dr. Dre, Carrie Underwood and Fiona Apple—and they assembled the album’s crisp, clean and punchy sound. Good Together may be Lake Street Dive’s tightest record. This is trim power-soul, boasting cranked up horn blasts and booming choruses—and no meandering solos or wafting jazz rhythms. 

Lake Street Dive will take Good Together on tour all summer. Kearney says that they are giddy to “bring that joyful rebellion onstage.” She adds, “These are songs that I hope capture the feeling I had playing that Staple Singers song. They feel different from ‘Good Kisser.’”

The band doesn’t believe they’ll change the world with these songs. But that’s not the only sign of making an impact. If you buy a ticket, then expect to hear “Dance With a Stranger,” and expect to dance with a stranger, too. 

“I have all the normal insecurities we all have. But when I’m onstage, I feel like the best dancer who’s ever lived, full of confidence. I can switch off those anxieties like a light,” Price says. “When we play, we’re all participating in this communal experience. We’re all together, thinking about each other. We’re looking at each other and saying, ‘I love you, and I hope you have a great time.’”

“It’s going to be so fun to create that energy every night and, hopefully, remember it in everyday life,” she continues. “If we’re all supporting each other, we’re not concerned about things within ourselves that don’t matter or about the things that divide us. And I think that’s the way out.”