This Friday, April 24th, indie-soul pop, jazz, and folk-rock-infused band Lake Street Dive is returning to Chattanooga to perform at Memorial Auditorium downtown.
The band’s sound is a hard one to pin down, spanning multiple genres; however, one can expect a night of powerful vocals, funky groove-based tunes, and a classic soul, jazz, and Motown vibe.
The group formed in 2004 in Boston at the New England Conservatory of Music, with the founding members, Rachael Price, Bridget Kearney, Mike Calabrese, and Mike Olson, all being students there at the time. Since then, they’ve gone on to release 8 studio albums, several EPs, and, in 2025, they were nominated for a Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album for their 2024 record, Good Together.
I remember truly discovering Lake Street Dive for the first time in college at the University of Georgia in the quaint town of Athens, Georgia, in the summer of 2014, when they released their album Bad Self-Portraits. Songs like “Better Than" and “You Go Down Smooth” from the record found me during a season when I needed music to find me. Both songs deal with the messiness of relationships, capturing a feeling that is hard to put into words. That’s what I love about their music; it captures a universal feeling we’ve all had while being fun, soulful, and laid-back at the same time.
The band is also known for their impressive covers of hit songs, with their cover of Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” on a street corner in 2012 going viral, currently sitting at over 8.1 million views on YouTube. This helped launch a career that was already blossoming and evolving quite well into the stratosphere.
They have gone on to release several other viral covers, including, most recently, a soulful, take-you-to-church cover of John Denver’s hit track “Leaving on a Jet Plane” in 2025. Five years ago, they got on a rooftop, decked out like the Beatles, and performed a cover of “Don’t Let Me Down” that currently sits at over 1.4 million views on YouTube.
They are a fun, explorative, and virtuosic band, and while they are primarily known for their multi-genre indie pop-soul and jazz-driven soundscape, their covers have very much been a crucial part of what they do and their success.
I got the opportunity to interview one of the founding members of the band, bassist, and winner of the 2005 John Lennon Songwriting Contest in the Jazz category, Bridget Kearney. She discussed how their songwriting has evolved since the early days.
“We’re always searching for new sounds and continue to push the boundaries of what we can do together as an ensemble. Also, I think there are certain gestures, melodically and musically, that are inherent to ourselves.
Everyone in the band has their own distinctive style and personality to their playing, and I think that’s what makes it so special, and I think it creates a through line to these changes that we explore throughout the evolution of the band. It’s nice to always be able to hear Rachael and Mike and be ourselves. That’s another interesting thing about having been a band for so long and continuing to make new albums: we’re evolving as people and just going through different phases of life. That becomes present in the snapshots that we’re taking along the way, these musical snapshots of "this is what it’s like to be in this stage of life.”
When asked about the band’s ability to balance songs that are incredibly joyful and fun with tracks that are incredibly profound and meaningful, Kearney suggested that the juxtaposition between the two is one of the things she loves most about music.
“I think those are two central things to what I love about music: a song that can make my body shake and a song that can really connect with me emotionally as well. If it’s possible to do that within the same song, then that’s amazing, and definitely throughout the course of a set or an album, there are moments for one or the other of those two things to be central. Sometimes you want to stop thinking for a second and just dance, and sometimes you want to take the beat out for a while and get super deep emotionally.”
Before hanging up with Bridget, I asked her about the group returning to Chattanooga and if she had any special memories of the city, and that’s when she mentioned that the thing she remembers most about the city is going to the Naughty Cat Cafe in St. Elmo. She happened to mention this two hours after I had been for the very first time, and we had some shared laughs about that.
Lake Street Dive started out road-dogging it, playing over 300 shows in over 175 different cities in 2013 and 2014, with several of them being sold-out shows, and they are now touring internationally, bringing their soulful, heavy, groove-focused soundscapes to cities all across the globe. Their music has left an indelible impact on me and countless other fans, providing songs that not only have the ability to rescue people during tough times but also make us stand up, dance, and shake our bodies, too.
Lake Street Dive
- Friday, April 24. 8 p.m.
- $55-$201.
- Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium, 399 McCallie Ave. Chattanooga
- tivolichattanooga.com