First Avenue, JAM, and The Current present Lake Street Dive

with Katie Pruitt

Doors 5:30 p.m. | Show 7 p.m. | 18+

Tickets on sale Friday, November 10 at 10am

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The Current is pleased to offer a ticket giveaway to this concert. Enter by noon (CDT) on Monday, September 16 for a chance to win a pair of passes to this concert. TWO (2) winners will receive two guest list spots to Lake Street Dive with special guest Katie Pruitt.

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Lake Street Dive

Since forming in 2004, Lake Street Dive have matched their sophisticated musicianship with a fearless refusal to limit their sound. As shown on their most recent full-length album, 2021's critically acclaimed Obviously, the Boston-bred band also possess a keen talent for combining sociopolitical commentary with immediately catchy pop gems. With their current lineup comprised of founding members Rachael Price (vocals), Bridget Kearney (bass), and Michael Calabrese (drums) — as well as keyboardist/vocalist Akie Bermiss and touring guitarist James Cornelison — Lake Street Dive continue to create joyously soulful rock & roll with equal parts ingenuity, intelligence, and irresistible abandon.

Although a certain spirited eclecticism has defined Lake Street Dive since their earliest days, the band's four original members first crossed paths while studying jazz at Boston's New England Conservatory of Music. Their full-length debut In This Episode… arrived in 2007, followed by three more independently released and rapturously received albums. As the band's energetic live show continued to earn them a devoted following, Lake Street Dive made their Nonesuch Records debut with Side Pony: a 2016 effort that instantly shot to No. 1 on three Billboard charts and later landed on Paste's 50 Best Albums of 2016 list. The following year, the group experienced a new infusion of creative energy with the addition of Bermiss (previously their touring keyboardist), who has since begun sharing writing and arrangement duties. Arriving in 2018, Lake Street Dive's self-produced sixth album Free Yourself Up debuted in the top ten on the Billboard 200 and spent seven and a half months on the non-commercial radio charts, with the smoldering hit single "Good Kisser" holding steady in the top five at Americana radio for over a month.

In recent years, Lake Street Dive have brought even more boldness to their kaleidoscopic sound while deliberately expanding their songcraft. To that end, Obviously finds the band examining such complex matters as gender inequality (on "Being a Woman") and the monumental challenges faced by younger generations (on "Making Do"), shaping each track with a profound intentionality and ineffable mastery of melody and groove — a process Price refers to as "putting these messages into three and a half minute snippets, dropping whatever truth we can and hoping it's the type of thing that people want to ruminate on." Made with producer Mike Elizondo (Fiona Apple, Mary J. Blige), the result is an endlessly illuminating body of work that's earned praise from the likes of Rolling Stone (who noted that "[a]t a moment when pop strives for lo-fi, solitary-world intimacy, the jazz-pop-whatever band refuse to think small").

To celebrate the 10-year anniversary release of Bad Self Portraits, Lake Street Dive will be releasing a limited edition, remastered LP on February 16, 2024. This special LP will feature 2 previously unreleased songs, offering fans an exclusive glimpse into the hidden gems of the band's creative vault.

Over the years, they've captivated massive audiences and through their fierce commitment to constantly elevating their artistry, Lake Street Dive have ultimately emerged as one of the most compelling voices in alternative music today, both reliably sublime and thrillingly unpredictable. Their ever-evolving journey will continue in 2024 with much anticipated new music and more.

Katie Pruitt

Katie Pruitt is living proof of music’s power to transform the way we experience the world. Soon after the arrival of her acclaimed debut Expectations—a 2020 LP on which she documented her journey in growing up queer in the Christian South—the Georgia-bred singer/songwriter/guitarist heard from countless listeners that her songs had impacted their lives on an elemental level. With her sophomore album Mantras, the Nashville-based musician now looks inward to explore such matters as gender identity, self-compassion or the lack thereof, and the struggle for peace in times of chaos and uncertainty—ultimately arriving at a body of work that speaks to the strength in undoing harmful self-beliefs and fully living your truth.

Mainly produced by Collin Pastore and Jake Finch (known for their work with boygenius and Lucy Dacus), Mantras delves deeper into the empathetic storytelling and incisive self-examination that defined Expectations—an album that earned Pruitt a nomination for Emerging Artist of the Year from the Americana Music Association and drew praise from major outlets like Rolling Stone (who hailed Pruitt as a “dynamic new presence”) and Pitchfork (who noted that “[h]er songs are patient but determined, navigating serious subjects with quiet familiarity”). This time around, Pruitt sets her lived-in lyricism to a folk-leaning sound informed by her love for the more experimental edges of indie-rock, stacking her songs with plenty of propulsive grooves and overdriven guitars as well as working with musicians like string arranger Laura Epling (Orville Peck, Spencer Cullum).

Although several songs took shape with the help of co-writers like singer/songwriter Ruston Kelly (Bethany Cosentino, Amanda Shires), Pruitt wrote most of Mantras on her own and imbued her lyrics with an expansive element of autobiography. In penning the album-opening “All My Friends (Are Finding New Beliefs),” she mined inspiration from a Christian Wiman poem of the same name, dreaming up a fuzzed-out and summery track etched with both self-aware reflection and sharp-witted observation on the search for clarity and purpose. Next, on “White Lies, White Jesus and You,” Pruitt shares a hazy yet frenetic meditation on hypocrisy in religion, tapping into her intense frustration with conservative Christian ideology. A profoundly introspective album, Mantras turns the lens on her own inner life with songs like “Self Sabotage”—a gloriously cathartic track that opens up about her struggle with negative thought loops. Meanwhile, on “Blood Related,” Pruitt presents a raw but poetic rumination on how family can sometimes feel like strangers, enlisting her mother as a background vocalist and embedding the track with audio recordings of her father and brother from old home videos. And while Mantras often pushes into emotionally heavy terrain, its songs frequently echo the radiant sense of joy and discovery that defined the album-making process. On “Naive Again,” for instance, Pruitt infuses the bright and dreamy tones of glockenspiel and xylophone into her melancholy contemplation on loss of innocence.

Looking over the tracklist to Mantras, Pruitt notes that a certain narrative thread emerged without her intention. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but the throughline for this record ended up being my own personal journey of letting go and learning how to love myself again—it begins with tension, frustration, and fear and resolves to a place of acceptance, surrender, and stillness,” she says. “I hope when people hear the record they feel what I felt after writing it, which was a sense of trusting myself and trusting that—no matter how bad things look—there’s always hope where there’s fear. I know that so much of the time we feel alone in our pain, so hopefully these songs help everyone to see that they can work through those big life changes and end up loving themselves a lot more.”