You think you’ve never heard of Lake Street Dive, and then all of a sudden, everyone’s talking about them. People at the gym. Another band (“Jazz musicians who play great pop music? Birds of a feather,” says local retro-futuristic swing outfit Hank West & The Smokin’ Hots on Facebook. “We like Lake Street Dive and you should too”). NPR is talking about them, too. “When Lake Street Dive performed ‘You Go Down Smooth’ amidst all the big stars T Bone Burnett had gathered for his Inside Llewyn Davis tribute concert, it provoked cheers,” says NPR reporter Ken Tucker. “The song, like much of Lake Street Dive’s material, looks to the past — in this case, a driving pop-soul ‘60s sound.”
The band, based in Brooklyn, met as students at the New England Conservatory in Boston. It was a street corner in Massachusetts that they performed a cover of Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back,” clustered around a single mic. A video of that performance garnered more than a million YouTube views, and then Burnett reached out and things got crazy.
Lake Street Dive has appeared on “The Colbert Report” and sold out a number of dates on their current tour, including Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, The Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, Terminal West in Atlanta and 3rd and Lindsley in Nashville. But, remarkably, there are still tickets for the band’s Tuesday, Feb. 25 show at The Grey Eagle. 8 p.m., $15 advance/$18 day of show.
Photo by Jarrod McCabe.
