Lake Street Dive Wanna See You Shake Your Booty During Their Oz Shows

Boston-based soul/jazz/pop four-piece Lake Street Dive have been around for 12 years and, although their singer Rachael Price was originally from Perth, it still took them a decade to get out to tour Australia for the first time. Multi-instrumentalist and co-founding member Mike Olson attributes this to the practicalities of bringing a band to Australia from the States and also to the fact that the band's career so far has been more of a slow burn than an overnight explosion.

"Well, you're extremely far away, there is that!" he laughs from his home in Charleston, South Carolina. "But it took us a long time to get basically anywhere outside the northeast of the States. We spent years touring around that area in our drummer's Subaru Forester. But you know what? That's how you do it. A lot of artists who may be of the mainstream pop persuasion, they blow up and go viral, they attain a lot of fame in a very short time. That's not how it worked for us."

"First of all we couldn't believe the weather — in the middle of our winter when we're usually freezing our asses off."

He feels that that slow build-up, plus the fact that the internet puts a band in touch with an audience much more quickly and easily than the way it used to be, strongly contributed to their ability to tour internationally now. "It's cool, too, because with the way that information has become so globalised, the fans are always there," he observes. "It's not like we have to go there and win everyone over from square one; they have access to our videos and our records and our Instagram feed and things like that, so the timing is right for us now."

Illustrating that point further is the fact that once they broke the ice on coming to Australia in 2014, they are heading back again within two years, playing a whole bunch of festival dates and club shows across late December and into January. "We couldn't be more excited," Olsen enthuses. "The last time we toured Australia, it was the first time we'd ever been down there, it was just an absolute blast. First of all we couldn't believe the weather — in the middle of our winter when we're usually freezing our asses off. We couldn't believe the people, we couldn't believe the food, the coffee — the whole nine yards. It was a great time."

Olson has a message for the Aussie fans, especially those who will be experiencing Lake Street Dive for the first time: come prepared to cast off your inhibitions, shake your booty and have a good time, because the band only feed off that kind of energy. "We try to have a lot of fun playing the music," he explains, "and we hope that that translates to our audience, and we hope that they have fun too. Ideally we'll see a lot of people dancing, because when we see people dancing, that's the quickest way for us to know we are reaching you. When that feedback comes, the shows get better and better; the crazier the crowd becomes."