MIXTAPE: Bridget Kearney’s Photographic Memories

From my early days of being photo editor of my high school newspaper to my current tour hobby of photographing bizarre regional potato chip flavors in their native lands for @chipscapes, I have long held a fascination for photography. As life rushes by us at a mile a minute a camera has the ability to freeze the frame for a second, capture a moment in time, and provide photographic evidence that the moment actually existed. Though the waves may have crashed into your impossibly magnificent sand castle, you can keep it standing forever in a photo. And though time may have drowned out a love that once burned impossibly bright, a security camera may have accidentally captured the most blissful moments of that love and if you can track down the footage and find those moments, you could potentially kick back on the couch and watch those moments on infinite loop forever.

This is the premise of my song, “Security Camera,” from my new album Comeback Kid. Beyond that song, the subject of photos, memories, and trying to hold on to a moment for what it was, to love that moment forever in spite of its ephemeral nature, weaves its way through the album as a common thread. I put together a playlist of songs on the theme of cameras and memory and it turns out a lot of my favorite songwriters and biggest influences have also been fascinated by this subject. Recorded music is basically the audio version of a photo/video, so it makes sense. Hope you enjoy these songs as much as I do. – Bridget Kearney

“Kamera” – Wilco

Jeff Tweedy seems to be using the camera as a self-revealing truth teller in this song. He’s lost his grip on reality and only a camera can tell him “which lies that I been hiding.” I have loved Wilco for a long time and have a very specific visual memory of listening to them on headphones in college: I was on a semester abroad in Morocco and I was going for a run along the beach in Essaouira and came upon these big sand dunes. I spontaneously decided to run up to the top of the dunes and then bound down them into the water. This joyous discovery of dune jumping on a perfect sunny day will always be soundtracked to Wilco’s song “Theologians” in my mind.

“Kodachrome” – Paul Simon

Paul Simon was always playing around the house when I was growing up and this song has a particular significance to the origin story of my band, Lake Street Dive: We were on one of our first tours and we were driving my parent’s minivan around the Midwest. The only way to listen to music in the van was through the CD player. It was in the pre-streaming era where we all would have had a big library of digital music on our laptops (probably illegally downloaded from Napster or the like). So we decided to co-create a mystery mix CD by passing around someone’s laptop and letting each of us put in songs one-by-one, not telling each other what we’d put it in. Then we burned out the mystery mix CD and listened to it together.

As four students studying jazz at a conservatory we had mostly listened to Charles Mingus and The Bad Plus together thus far, but the mystery mix exposed all four of us pop music fiends. Song after song kept coming on and we’d go, “Oh my god, you like Lauryn Hill too?!” and “You also know every lyric to David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’?!” This culminated in the moment when the mystery mix played Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” THREE TIMES IN A ROW! That was when we knew we should be a band forever. The groove on this song is also part of the inspiration for the song “If You’re Driving” from Comeback Kid.

“Hey Ya” – Outkast

Not actually a song about photos and you’re not actually supposed to shake Polaroid pictures, but Andre 3000 is one of the greatest musicians of our time and I’ve learned so much from him about music and language and spirit! Also this song is a total jam.

“Security Camera” – Bridget Kearney

I live in Brooklyn and there are security cameras everywhere here – at the bodegas, at the clubs, on the rooftops. Their purpose is to capture criminals in the act of committing a crime, but they are also capturing so many other things. Everyday things and extraordinary things. Moments of extreme beauty and moments of extreme pain. The idea behind this song is to track down security camera footage of the very best moments of your life so you can watch them on repeat.

“Pictures Of Me” – Elliott Smith

I went through a huge Elliott Smith phase in college and had an instrumental Elliott Smith cover band. His harmonies and melodies are so good that you don’t even need the lyrics, but adding them in, of course, makes it all the better. This one seems to say that pictures can lie to you, too.

“Picture In a Frame” – Tom Waits

This is one of those songs that seems like it has existed forever. “Ever since I put your picture in a frame” sounds to me like he is saying, “Ever since I decided to love you.”

“Body” – Julia Jacklin

My friend Michael Leviton (a great photographer and musician!) told me about this song and its passing but gutting reference to a photo. We were talking about how I had realized that a lot of my songs are about cameras and photography and how funny it is to look back at your own songs and see patterns and discover what you’ve been obsessed with the whole time. Michael said his thing is “curtains,” which appear over and over again in his songs.

“Bad Self Portraits” – Lake Street Dive

A song I wrote for Lake Street Dive years ago about what happens when the person you want to take a picture of steps out of the frame. What you’re left with and how to make the most of it.

“Videotape” – Radiohead

I always thought this song was about when you die and you are at the pearly gates of heaven, they are deciding whether you get in or not and watch back videotapes of your life to see if you were good or bad. I don’t know if that’s what Radiohead meant, but that’s my interpretation! The production is so cool, the way the drum loop is slightly off tempo and moves around the phrase slowly as it cycles around. Damn, Radiohead is so cool!!

There are a few songs on Comeback Kid that are directly Radiohead influenced. “Sleep In” is like Radiohead meets Ravel (or that’s what I was going for!) When I graduated from Iowa City West High School, I arranged a version of “Paranoid Android” that some friends and I played instrumentally at the graduation ceremony. In retrospect, that is a really weird song for us to have played at graduation! But I think it’s cool that they let us be brooding teenagers and go for it.

“When the Lights Go Out” – Sarah Jarosz

The song that gave Sarah’s brilliant new record its title, Polaroid Lovers. I feel so inspired by the music that my friends make, and Sarah’s songs from this album really knocked me off my feet when I heard the album and even more so when I heard them live!

“People Take Pictures of Each Other” – The Kinks

A festive little song about taking photos of things to prove that they existed.

“I Bet Ur” – Bridget Kearney

This is a song from the album I put out last year, Snakes of Paradise. The narrative is built around seeing a picture of something that you don’t want to see, letting your imagination fill in the details, and learning to accept it as truth.

“I Turn My Camera On” – Spoon

Groove goals. The camera here puts a bit of distance between you and the world.

“Photograph” – Ringo Starr

A song about photographs by my favorite Beatle? Yes, please!

“My Funny Valentine” – Chet Baker

I love Chet Baker’s singing, his pure, dry, affectless delivery, his deadpan panache. And I love the way this song manages to rhyme “laughable” and “un-photographable” and stick the landing.

“Camera Roll” – Kacey Musgraves

Photography has been around for a long time now but carrying thousands of photos of our lives organized in chronological order in our pockets at all times is relatively new. And both wonderful and terrible.

“Come Down” – Anderson .Paak

Just a passing reference to pictures in this song, but I had to get Anderson .Paak on the playlist because he’s the best!

“Obsessed” – Bridget Kearney

A song about falling quickly, unexpectedly, insanely in love with someone and trying to understand how it happened. You look back at the pictures as evidence trying to gather clues, see the train of events that led to this madness.


Photo Credit: Rodneri

BGS Wraps: Brenda Lee, Andy Thorn, Joy Clark, and More

Hanukkah has begun, advent calendars have barely three weeks left, and days will start getting longer when we reach winter solstice in merely 13 days – but who’s counting? As we lean further and further into the coziest, roots music-iest time of year, we’re rounding up our favorite seasonal and holiday albums, tracks, and shows each week on BGS Wraps. Scroll to find this list in playlist form, plus don’t miss our Classic Holiday Album Recommendation of the week.

We’ll be back next Friday with more BGS Wraps! Until then enjoy some hot cider or some eggnog and some delightfully festive bluegrass, country, and roots music.

Hayes Carll and Melissa Carper, “Christmas in Prison”

A perennial favorite penned by none other than John Prine, “Christmas in Prison” is a rare country Christmas song that can be sung year-round. Like your favorite holiday movie that’s actually not specifically a holiday movie – Die Hard? Little Women? – this is a song so classic, so iconic, that it demands recognition across the calendar and not merely in December. Hayes Carll and Melissa Carper join together on this brand new rendition and they do the song justice, for sure.


Joy Clark, “Gumbo Christmas” 

As most holidays are, Christmas is its own familial and cultural melting pot, and guitarist and singer-songwriter Joy Clark highlights her own New Orleans traditions with “Gumbo Christmas.” It’s a song with a recipe both literal and figurative, a combination all of the best holiday dishes know intimately. That Big Easy horn section is fit to carry us into 2024.


CMA Country Christmas (December 14, ABC; December 15, Hulu and Disney+)

The queen of Christmas in Nashville, Amy Grant, is co-hosting this year’s CMA Country Christmas TV special on ABC with none other than Trisha Yearwood. With performances by The War & Treaty, Ashley McBryde, Jon Pardi, reigning CMA Entertainer of the Year Lainey Wilson, and more. Tune in on Thursday, December 14 for the live program, or watch the following day – and throughout the season – on Hulu and Disney+. For those of us who won’t make Vince Gill and Grant’s annual holiday residency at the Ryman in Nashville, this show will be an excellent consolation prize.


Rose Cousins, “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm”

There’s almost no better artist to turn to for delicious melancholia than Rose Cousins. Her new holiday single, “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” demonstrates this fact and then some. Winter songs without a specific religious or traditional bent are too rare, so we especially love this track for its “agnosticism” and relatability. Why care how much it may storm, if you’ve got your love to keep you warm? We hope you are surrounded by love this holiday season, and however lonesome or joyous you’re feeling this year, Cousins’ voice will envelope you like a toasty hug.


Bridget Kearney, “Don’t Think About the Polar Bear”

A vibey and meditative new track from Lake Street Dive bassist Bridget Kearney is another holiday track of the Die Hard sort – not demonstrably seasonal, but it works so we’re accepting it with open arms into our wintry celebration. The accompanying animated music video is whimsical enough to be a fitting addition to any lineup with The Grinch, Rudolph, and all of your other favorite Christmas animated TV specials. If your intention is to not think about someone this holiday season, you might just find them wandering across your mind – so don’t think about the polar bear, instead.


The Kody Norris Show, “Mountain City Christmas”

The territory surrounding Mountain City, Tennessee, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and Southwest Virginia is home to most of the farms that grow most of the Christmas trees for the eastern seaboard of the United States. It’s more than fitting, then, to take this nostalgic and magical Kody Norris Show-led journey through the picturesque counties they call home. What’s more bluegrass than singing about snow, home, family, faith, and rhyming “there” with “Christmas carol”?


Larry & Joe, “Mi Burrito Sabanero”

Bluegrass banjo player and fiddler Joe Troop and harpist, multi-instrumentalist Larry Bellorín are Larry & Joe. Their new holiday single, “Mi Burrito Sabanero,” is a funny, raucous, and enjoyable version of a quintessential Latin American holiday tune written by Venezuelan harpist and composer Hugo Blanco. Much of Troop’s work connects the dots between Latin folk music and American roots music, crafting idiosyncratic amalgamations often expected to be more disparate and dissonant than they really are. For this track, Bellorín set aside the harp and picked up the cuatro, with Troop adding twin fiddles and banjo in another instance of remarkable latingrass fusion.


Maddie & Tae, We Need Christmas

Maddie & Tae, of “Girl in a Country Song” fame, recently released an extended cut of their 2020 holiday EP, We Need Christmas, adding three new tracks – each classic Christmas carols – to the fan favorite collection. Both women are now married and starting families and there’s a confidence and ease they’ve grown into at this phase of their careers. Easily some of the most interesting pop country being made, and certainly an excellent holiday manifestation of the form.


Brenda Lee, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”

For the first time in her 60+ year career Brenda Lee has scored a Number 1 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart with her truly unforgettable holiday single, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” How she supplanted Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas,” we’ll never know, but we are so glad for Lee that she’s notched this incredible milestone even at this late stage in her lifelong music-making. She first recorded the iconic track as a thirteen-year-old and in an emotional video posted by Billboard and to her social media, you can tell she never imagined this song would be the gem it is in the crown of her music career. Congratulations, Brenda Lee!


Kaitlyn Raitz, “River”

Cellist, composer, and arranger Kaitlyn Raitz released a stunning, instrumental string-centered cover of Joni Mitchell’s “River” a handful of weeks ago, a timely tune drop for those of us struggling to navigate the holidays without Mitchell’s catalog available on a certain streaming service. Lush and romantic, Raitz’s cut of the track is high concept while down to earth, like a perfect Christmas Eve program at a local church, stained glass bookended by poinsettias and candles. A must-add for your instrumental holiday playlists or perfect to soundtrack your cookie icing party or frenzied gift swaps.


Matt Rogers, Have You Heard of Christmas?

BGS Wraps would be simply incomplete without a laugh-so-hard-you’re-crying option, supplied here by comedian Matt Rogers’ holiday outting, Have You Heard of Christmas? With guests such as Muna (swoon-a), Bowen Yang (Rogers’ co-host of the hit podcast, Las Culturistas, known from SNL), and Leland, Have You Heard of Christmas is pure chaos, absolutely unhinged. Melodrama meets the chronically online. Joe’s Pub, dragged through 54 Below. When you’re offered aux this year at your holiday gatherings, put this one on. We dare you.


Andy Thorn, High Country Holiday

Banjoist Andy Thorn was known as Leftover Salmon’s banjo player, before a video of him serenading a wild fox went mega viral and eclipsed all other entries on his resumé. Thorn – who is a self-professed Christmas fanatic – has recently released a brand new holiday album, High Country Holiday, drawing on inspiration from his Colorado backyard and his musical community to put together a bevy of carols and one bespoke original, “The Bells of Boulder.” Add it to your stack of bluegrass Christmas records! It’s destined to become a classic in that category.


Tim and James, A Tim and James Christmas

Los Angeles-based string duo Tim and James – Tim Reynolds and James Spaite – have followed up their popular debut, Lemon Tree, with a holiday EP, A Tim and James Christmas and it’s already a favorite of ours. These simple duets feel fully realized, even while they remain contained, and draw on folk, new acoustic, and chambergrass influences. The kernel within Tim and James’ music – that took their songs from beginning as a regular Tuesday collaboration to tens of thousands of streams – is on full display. There’s something entrancing about this bare bones, four-song collection.


Our Classic Holiday Album Recommendation of the Week:
Béla Fleck & the Flecktones, Jingle All the Way

Each year we are reminded of the sheer genius of Béla Fleck & the Flecktones’ Jingle All the Way. It’s a Christmas album we return to again and again and we know we aren’t the only ones – it was chosen by magazine (yes, Oprah’s publication) as 2008’s Best Christmas Album and it peaked at Number 1 on the contemporary jazz charts. Béla and the Flecktones’ cultural impact was certainly solidified by the time Jingle All the Way had released, but this album – perhaps more than any other music by the group in the 21st Century – cemented their broad, far-reaching influence.


Photo Credit: Joy Clark by Nkechi Chibueze; Rose Cousins by Lindsay Duncan; Andy Thorn courtesy of the artist.

The Show On The Road – Lake Street Dive

This week, Z. Lupetin and The Show On The Road bring you a conversation with internationally loved soul-pop pioneers Lake Street Dive. Starting out as jazz nerds storming local folk festivals and tiny rock clubs around Boston, they’ve since become a well-oiled touring phenomenon, headlining Red Rocks, traveling across Europe, playing late night on Colbert and Kimmel, all while refusing to settle into an easily nameable genre. In 2021, after three years since their last release, they celebrated their much-awaited seventh studio album Obviously.

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Most notable bands are like sunsets: they flash their colors, they create a few memories and fade away. And most groups that attempt, somehow, to connect virtuoso players in the jazz, roots, and rock ‘n’ roll scenes never actually live in the same town. Each have a Beatles-esque knack for singing sublime harmony and writing effortlessly killer hooks (see fan favorites like “Go Down Smooth,” “Good Kisser,” or their new TikTok earworm, “Hypotheticals”) and also each have their own solo groups? Maybe they last a few fiery tours and finally disband. And yet Lake Street Dive have become a steady standard-bearer in the nascent Americana world — and only seem to be getting tighter and more creative 17 years in.

Founded in 2004 by luminous singer Rachael Price, upright bassist-songwriter Bridget Kearney, high-energy drummer Mike Calabrese, and the recently departed guitarist-trumpeter Mike “McDuck” Olsen at The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, the group caught new wind and inspiration after adding kinetic keyboardist/singer-songwriter Akie Bermiss in 2017.

After months of planning, we finally caught up with Calabrese and Bermiss on Zoom to discuss how they are forging a fresh path forward after a tough year and a half away. Make sure you stick around to end of the episode to hear how they meticulously created their knockout a-cappella pop gem, “Sarah,” which closes out their new LP.


Photo credit: Shervin Lainez

The Cream of Four Crops: A Conversation with Lake Street Dive’s Mike “McDuck” Olson

Lake Street Dive rather famously borrows a little bit from a lot of things. At times exuding an old school R&B vibe, at others a bright pop sound, their music is equal parts the Beatles and Motown, with a bit of brassy big band thrown in for good measure. Where that kind of uncategorized approach might sound messy — even noisy — under another band’s thumb, Lake Street Dive doesn’t lose track of their identity, even as they pepper it with myriad influences.

The classically trained four-piece includes guitarist and trumpeter Mike “McDuck” Olson, upright bassist Bridget Kearney, drummer Mike Calabrese, and vocalist Rachael Price, whose bluesy alto grounds whatever musical path the band explores. Lake Street Dive is set to release their third studio album and Nonesuch Records debut,  Side Pony,  on February 19. Produced by Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson), the album involves new risks — like challenging time signatures — alongside the jazzy approach to pop the band has played heretofore. It’s a step forward for the band but, as Olson explains, not a new direction.

I’ve got to ask: Where does the nickname “McDuck” come from?

Oh, it’s an old college nickname. I had mono when I moved into the dorms [at the New England Conservatory of Music] my first year, so instead of being friendly and looking to make new friends like Mike Calabrese was, I told everyone to go away and leave me alone while I got better. I earned the nickname "Scrooge McDuck." Fortunately, the McDuck is the only part that stuck.

Stephen Colbert took a liking to your sound when he hosted The Colbert Report, and he recently invited you back to play The Late Show . What was it like performing for Colbert again?

It was sort of a double-whammy return because Colbert’s show is in the Ed Sullivan Theater, which is also the theater that Letterman taped out of, so it was cool because it was kind of like playing Colbert on steroids. It was also cool to be back in that theater that we had done the Letterman show in. It had been redecorated, and a lot of the same crew people are still working the show, so it was nice to see some of those guys again. It’s fun, too, because we’re not quite as nervous as we used to get, although we’re not completely immune to it. I’d say that I don’t have the same mind-numbing terror going on TV that we used to when we did the first Colbert taping.

One of Side Pony ’s singles, “Call Off Your Dogs,” shows an interesting approach to meter and rhythm compared to the band’s earlier work. Where are you drawing that inspiration from?

The main riff, which is in 3/4 time, came out of Bridget’s fascination with … it’s sort of two-fold. She spent some time in Africa studying music from Ghana and she studied abroad in Morocco as a college student, combined with a bass player’s innate love of Motown bass lines a la the Jackson 5. The composition, in its first version, was all in 3 and had a trickier rhythmic framework.

Then, when we went into the studio to record it, Dave Cobb didn’t encourage us to stay tricky. He’s someone for whom pop music is candy, and he encouraged us to keep some of the trickier musical elements because that’s interesting for people who are in tune with that, but then say, "Okay, if you’re going to have the tricky 3/4 verses, we gotta go into 4/4 on the choruses." Because that’s what’s going to get people up and dancing — that’s the fist pumping. So it was a combination of this sort of studiousness on Bridget’s part, and kind of the polar opposite lack of studiousness on Dave’s part that made us combine those two elements in the studio.

The way the verses and chorus oscillate back and forth with one another, rhythmically, is so interesting. It took me a second to wrap my head around what was happening when I heard it.

It’s nice, too, because we’ve been playing with the disco thing. On its own, the disco thing is very dated. If you release a song that has a straight-down-the-pike disco feel in the drums and guitar parts, it immediately makes people think, "Oh great, leisure suits, the light-up dance floors." Stuff like that. We were reticent to do something that was so derivative of one specific thing just because we don’t like to pigeonhole ourselves. So to blend something so immediately identifiable as disco with something that’s a little bit more intellectual made us feel better about using both elements in the same song.

Speaking about elements, the band rather famously deals in many sounds and influences. How do you keep everything from becoming too chaotic, either in a song or across an album?

I think part of it is that we aren’t necessarily, you know, we’re not studio musicians. If someone needs a country track or someone needs a disco track or someone needs a straight-up Motown track recorded for someone’s record, they’ll call people who are skillful in recreating those styles faithfully. We just aren’t that good at recreating something verbatim and, fortunately, that has worked in our favor. We have our idiosyncrasies that we, if not fall back on, then are actually very comfortable in. So it’s sort of like we’re filtering all of these omnivorous style dalliances through this far more narrow Lake Street Dive sort of sieve. It’s also what we enjoy doing and what we think is fun, what parts we think are most fun to play, and those end up smoothing out the edges of something that is more rigidly stylistic.

Well, that’s what makes it so interesting. I’ll listen to a song and pick out three or four influences, but under your umbrella as Lake Street Dive, it all comes together in this new way. It isn’t chaotic, but in another band’s hands, it could easily devolve into a mess.

Well, sometimes it feels like a mess, but I’m glad it’s not coming across that way.

In your composing or songwriting process, is it the four of you together banging something out, or does someone bring up an idea first?

The kernels for a song idea will come in from an individual. All four of us are pretty avid and voluminous songwriters. It can be something as simple as a hook or, in the case of “Call Off Your Dogs,” a rhythm and a bass line. Or it can be a completely realized song with the lyrics, the form, the solos, all this stuff written out. When it comes to the band for the purposes of learning, that’s when the arranging takes place or, in the case of the studio, we did end up doing a lot of writing together, but it all came from a kernel someone had come up with on their own. We don’t sit around and bang out ideas, you know, staring at each other awkwardly across acoustic guitars. That has never been our method.

Isn’t that how the best songs have been written? Awkwardly staring at someone?

[Laughs] Isn’t that how the Lennon/McCartney thing worked? I don’t know. It’s not for us.

So then, from your perspective, what kind of subject matter interests you as a songwriter?

We tend to use pretty familiar pop tropes as, at least, a starting point. We’re not going out on too many limbs here with subject matter, you know; we’re not writing protest songs. It all boils down to love in one way or another, either found or lost. There’s already been 80 years of pop music based on love found and lost. It’s a pretty deep well and, as far as we’re concerned, it’s not been exhausted yet. Until it is, we’re going to keep writing love songs.

It just so happens to be this quirky perspective, which distinguishes you from the major songwriters focused on that very subject.

It is about finding your filter that you want to apply. It’s not satisfying as songwriters — nor is it satisfying to listeners — to hear a song that’s the same kind of lens. They’re all love songs, but they can be viewed through talking about love as self-examination in the modern era — like “Self Portraits” talking about selfies and things like that. It can be sort of veiled and derived through the study of classic Beatles songs, like “You Go Down Smooth” is. As students of music, we enjoy challenging ourselves and each other to come up with as many different ways to explore this well-trodden subject matter, because it’s just more interesting for us that way, and we’re in it for the long game, too. Shame on us if we let it get boring.

If you’re talking about filters, my takeaway is that yours tends to be much more intelligent than what the average love song purports itself to be.

I hope so, but it’s also … it’s an extremely luxurious position to be in with four songwriters in the band, because we all write. We’re not like Carole King who went into the office everyday and, as a professional songwriter, generated hit after hit after hit. All four of us, we have our hits and our misses, but because there are four of us, we have a lot more hits to choose from. We tend to scrape off the very best from the top, which is awesome because it also means that listening back on previous records you don’t hear songs of yours that you absolutely hate. It’s the cream of the crop — the cream of four crops.

Turning to Side Pony, what’s the shape of that new album compared to your last two studio releases?

Thematically, the hope is that it’s the next step. In that, it’s the next step in the evolution of the band and the four of us as individuals and songwriters. There are hopefully bigger risks being taken, hopefully there are unexpected things, there are stylistic departures. But it’s not a new direction. I think that it’s easy to play a track that relies on disco and think, "Oh, this is going to be a new direction for Lake Street Dive." Never, at any point, did we go into this process and say to ourselves, "Let’s do something new." The thought was more like, "Let’s do something better than last time." Not that last time was bad, just that we always hope to improve upon what we’ve done. That’s the key to longevity, of course.

Genre really does matter in terms of being able to categorize and market a band, but you’ve very proudly remained what I’ve read Bridget describe as "genre-less." Why do you think you’ve been so successful when you’re not necessarily following the formula?

I think the short answer is that we have managed to play successful shows for a really diverse array of audiences over the years and have been able to build a fan base, essentially, wherever we go. We’ve had a lot of luck as openers for bigger bands, and those bigger bands have been a very wide range of artists. We opened for Josh Ritter for a couple of months a few years back, we opened for the Yonder Mountain String Band, we opened for a surf rock band called Los Straitjacketes, which wears luchador masks on stage.

There was a trend: We would be sitting at the merch table after opening for these other bands, and their fans — from one show to the next — consistently we would hear, "Hey that was pretty good." These people that came for something completely different, we somehow managed to keep their attention through our set, sell them merch, and get their names on our email list, and the next time we came to town, they would come back. You can see the music you like in Lake Street Dive. I hope that is what it is, because if not, I don’t really have any other answer.


Photos courtesy of the artist

3×3: Parsonsfield on Sea Bass, Sausage Grinding, and Showering in the Sink

Artist: Antonio Alcorn (mandolin guy for Parsonsfield)
Hometown: Leverett, MA
Latest Album: Afterparty
Personal Nicknames: My personal hero, Bridget Kearney of Lake Street Dive, once very confidently called me Sebastian backstage. I liked it so much I went with it, and I've been known as Sebastian ever since (or Sea Bass, for short). If she reads this, it will be the first she's heard of it.

Your house is burning down and you can grab only one thing — what would you save?
My first mandolin.

If you weren't a musician, what would you be?
It's best not to think about.

How many unread emails or texts currently fill your inbox?
Countless …

What is the one thing you can’t survive without on tour?
The ol' sink shower.

If you had to get a tattoo of someone's face, who would it be?
The invisible man. I already have one … but I'd get another.

Who is your favorite superhero?
My friend Luca, who once fought an octopus with his bare hands.

The Simpsons or South Park?
Simpsons, seasons six and earlier.

Dolly or Loretta?
Dolly … If you haven't listened to slow-ass "Jolene" yet, you're missing out.

Meat lover's or veggie?
I'm typing this with one hand and holding a sausage grinder in the other.

WATCH: Bridget Kearney and Benjamin Lazar Davis, ‘Slow Rider’

Artist: Bridget Kearney and Benjamin Lazar Davis
Hometown: Brooklyn, NY
Song: "Slow Rider"
Album: Bawa
Release Date: September 18
Label: Signature Sounds

In Their Words: "'Slow Rider' was the first song that we wrote for this EP and it's based on the Bawa song 'Sisalla' which was the first thing that got us excited about Bawa music. The four-bar loop that is a back-up part for 'Sisalla' has this crazy lilt to the rhythmic composition that was deceptively hard to learn and had a mysterious magic to it. I remember the day we learned it. After our lesson with Aaron Bebe, we went straight back to the room we had rented at the University of Ghana in Legon to work on it. And it was about 90 degrees in there and there was no A/C. But we were just sitting there playing into the ceiling fans, sweating buckets, and looping those four bars on repeat for hours and hours. Finally, we were really in the groove of it and feeling all the subtleties of how the notes work together and that was when the vocal melody started to take shape over top of it and we started stringing the words together. That guitar loop is still magical to me every time I play it. It's a back-up part, but it's really the main event!" — Bridget Kearney


Photo credit: Tim Davis