Rachel Price says Lake Street Dive didn’t hire a pop producer—they hired a Swiss Army knife. “We chose Mike Elizondo mostly because we were so into the hip-hop music he’s produced,” she tells me. “He’s also an upright jazz bass player, he loves folk, and he did one of my favorite Fiona Apple records.” Translation: no genre panic, just taste. The band rolled in with 30 sketches born from a new habit—writing in pairs, on tour, in real time—and Elizondo became “another member,” the benevolent tiebreaker. “Basically every song he chose, we recorded,” Price says. It’s not democracy; it’s delegation.
No, she’s not rapping. The hip-hop part is in the bones: dry, unfussy drums, low-gloss sonics, space that lets a hook breathe without an Instagram filter. “If we’re getting specific, it’s the way the drums sound,” Price says. “Pretty dry overall. Then you apply that aesthetic to our songs.” The demos were a mess of possibilities, the point being that nothing was obvious—irony acknowledged.
Price writes best with prompts and receipts. For “Nobody’s Stopping You Now,” she mainlined her 12-to-14-year-old journals—time capsules of crushes she can’t even remember. “There are chapters about boys I literally don’t remember,” she laughs. “I started writing from that perspective or about that person I was. No expectation of recording it. I do well with exercises like that.” Flip it and you get “Making Do,” the future-facing climate anxiety track designed to last longer than a news cycle. “We’re not going to tire of that issue,” she says. “Sadly, it’s timeless.” The band’s politics don’t sit on a merch table—they do “Virtual Lessons for Actual Change,” donation-based music lessons funneling money to racial-justice orgs. “Everyone puts in about an hour a week,” Price says. “We’re raising thousands a month and hoping to double it. Small amounts of work for big collective effort.”
If you want a thesis hammered to the wall, try “Being a Woman,” written by Bridget Kearney. “The thesis is being a woman is a full-time job,” Price says, noting how Kearney labored over every line, then re-questioned them anyway. “It’s scary to say something like that in a song—even though it’s true,” Price says. The backdrop may change from one administration to the next, but the power dynamics don’t retire. “There will always be people in power taking advantage of people who aren’t,” she shrugs. “Timeless, for worse.” The trick is to lace the medicine into something you can still hum. “It’s cool when a three-minute song you can bop to carries a message that grows the more you listen,” she says.
Lake Street Dive obsess over the visuals, too—not as garnish, but world-building. “So much thought,” Price admits. “Clothes, background, photo—we take it seriously. It’s a fun part of the job.” There’s no lofty art-speak label for the look; somewhere there’s a Pinterest board doing the heavy lifting. Which is very Lake Street Dive: don’t announce the concept, just make one you can live inside.
Hip-hop drums without cosplay, pop structure without capitulation, activism without sloganeering, and a singer who will happily dunk on her teenage self if it means the lyric lands. Put another way: they challenged themselves without setting anything on fire except the reverb sends.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
