“This might be the only place.”
This mantra-like refrain of “What About Flamingos?,” the title track to Lake Street Dive’s ninth album, asks us to remember that planet Earth might very well be the only one of its kind, and therefore everything that exists in our world is unique and awe-inspiring. Bassist/background vocalist Bridget Kearney wrote the song after listening to an interview with musician and record producer, Brian Eno, who said, “We still don’t know that there’s any other life in the universe, which is phenomenal, if you think about it. It might all be on this one place. Those things make me constantly grateful for the fact that I’m alive… it’s like an amazing show at a theater and you managed to get a ticket to see it.”
Hearing Eno’s philosophy of reverence and gratitude for life on Earth sparked Bridget to write a song listing everyday wonders we take for granted. “In a stream of consciousness, the first thing that came to mind was, ‘What about flamingos?’ It’s highly unlikely that anywhere else in the universe has these magnificent pink birds that stand on one leg. ‘What about ice cream?’ Cows, milk, sugar, and a cold freezer?! That’s amazing! And the line ‘What about The Beatles?’ is very specific to what we’re doing musically, because we’re five human beings and by the grace of whatever, we exist, we found each other, and we are in this room together making music.”
The room Bridget is referring to is drummer/background vocalist Mike Calabrese’s basement studio in rural Vermont (aka “The Breezeway”), where Lake Street Dive wrote their first GRAMMY®-nominated album, 2024’s Good Together. In the spring of 2025, just a few short months after playing their near-sellout first show at Madison Square Garden, the members of Lake Street Dive – vocalist Rachael Price, bassist/background vocalist Bridget Kearney, drummer/background vocalist Mike Calabrese, keyboardist/vocalist Akie Bermiss, and guitarist/background vocalist James Cornelison – gathered to work on new music for what would become their ninth album, and very first independent release, What About Flamingos?. On the other side of a few new career high water marks brought on by Good Together was an exciting new chapter, with many more firsts ahead. While much was unknown as they embarked on this year and a half journey, the intent from the beginning was to lean even further into a creative chemistry well honed by twenty-two years together, and take a new approach to their recording process: live in a room together. The idea originated with Rachael.
“I realized that we’ve never achieved a live recording. Something we’ve definitely heard from our fans for years, is that they love our live shows,” Rachael shares. “And personally, I was not enamored any longer with my process of recording vocals, where I would go in after the band had done the track, and then sing over that. I wanted to be a part of the recording process from the beginning. So I sent an email to the band with all my thoughts and reasonings, and everyone said, ‘Let’s go for it.’”
As it turned out, it wasn’t hard to convince them. Akie explains, “There’s a magic that happens [before we go to the recording studio] when we get to the end of our writing sessions, and we’re playing down all of the songs, all in the room together, and we can all see and hear each other. That magic can be hard to recapture in a big studio setting, and that was what we were chasing on this album.”
Lake Street Dive welcomes us into the journey of bringing that pursuit to life with the slow burning album opener, “Back In Time”, which in many ways embodies and introduces the mission of What About Flamingos?, and speaks to some of its central themes: the perfection of imperfection, being in the moment, and rediscovering and appreciating the everyday miracles of life on earth. Like several of the songs, it was written using prompts members of the band gave to one another. Akie gave Bridget the assignment of writing a song blending Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Fences” and Janet Jackson’s album Control, resulting in the super funky and danceable “Fences”, the arrestingly lovely and emotionally moving album closer, “It’s Getting Late” came from a prompt given to Rachael by Bridget to “write a song as if Laura Marling was writing a song for Lake Street Dive”, and “Back In Time” was born of a prompt given to Mike from Rachael. “I told Mike to write a song that had an A, B, A, C form, which is a classic jazz standard and American songbook form that is not written in anymore, and I said, ‘And there has to be a singalong at the end.’”
That singalong is the last line of the song, and is another album mantra: “If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t.” Calabrese shares, “I went through my song seed notes, and I found a sentence, ‘If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t.’ It was based on a physicist/philosopher I was listening to who was talking about time, and how it’s more of a perception than anything. There was a line he said that stuck in my head. It was something like, ‘If you wanna change the past, your best option is right now.’ and I thought to myself, as much as you might want to go back in time, you could get lost going back and fixing this thing and fixing that thing and trying to make things perfect for your now. But you would just be spending all your time in the past.”
The song was written quickly, and recorded quickly, and ultimately, that first demo version that they recorded that day ended up being the one they chose to keep. No going back in time to fix imperfections. No studio polishing. As they listened back to the songs they recorded that last day of writing sessions it was clear they were onto something.
Akie recalls, “At the end of the first writing session, we did “Back in Time” and it was one of the first times we were like, ‘Ooh, this album has a vibe.’ There was an otherworldly thing that came out of it. And then, when Bridget brought “What About Flamingos?” to the second writing session, those two songs became the two poles of this thing, and from there on we were just watching other songs fall into the gravitational pull of those two poles.”
By the time Lake Street Dive reconvened for a second writing session in January of 2025 they had amassed close to forty songs between them, and began the task of whittling them down to what they would take to the studio. The album’s lead single, the killer rock song “You’re Never Around” (“one of the most Lake Street Dive songs we’ve ever recorded” according to Rachael Price), was brought to the group by their newest member, guitarist James Cornelison. He recalls, “People get accustomed to you coming and going, and they only see the social media version of you. I post a lot more about what I’m doing on the road than what I’m doing at home, so a lot of people might only see me as gone. A lot of touring musicians experience that. It was the first song that I ever attempted to write for the band, and it was very much with the spirit of the first Lake Street Dive records that I ever listened to in mind.”
Adding another first to their approach on this ninth album, Lake Street Dive decided to take their mission of recording the new songs live and their quest to retain the vibe they loved from the demos recorded in Calabrese’s basement to two different producers, on opposite coasts. The first What About Flamingos? sessions were recorded at Spillway Sounds in West Hurley, NY, with GRAMMY®-nominated producer, Philip Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker, Big Thief, Cass McCombs). In one of the coldest weeks of the winter, in a cozy, cabin-like living room, fireplace at times faintly crackling on tape, Lake Street Dive gathered in a casual semi-circle, with Rachael seated on the couch, and did their first round of recordings with Weinrobe at the helm.
In addition to “You’re Never Around”, the tender and feel good ode to love “All Ways” came from those first sessions at Spillway Sounds, and gives the listener a close-up of Rachael Price’s singular voice in a moment of earthy, unadorned beauty. Long time fans may notice that “All Ways” is one of a batch of love songs that appear on What About Flamingos?. Bridget shares, “The band has had a fair amount of breakup songs, but we don’t have a lot of just straight up love songs. So that was an interesting new challenge to figure out. It was like, how do you find storytelling in happiness and stability? I’m in this really nice, comfy, stable relationship right now, and it was giving me license to write in that way. So that’s what’s behind “My Own Damn Way”, “All Ways”, and “One Job”.”
The band’s time in wintery Upstate New York at Spillway Sounds became the yin to the yang of going to sunny Los Angeles to work with producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Angel Olsen, Dawes, Margo Price) at his Five Star Studios in Topanga Canyon. Where the first setting had been very close, and internal, the backdrop of Wilson’s studio was described as having wide open vistas, bright sky, cacti, windchimes, and wandering peacocks. The more open outdoor environment at this next stage of recording What About Flamingos? mirrored opening up their approach as well. Akie’s groove-laden “Gertrude”, an ode to Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, features frequent collaborators the Huntertones who recorded their horn parts in New Orleans at Marigny Studios – the only track on the new album with overdubs recorded separately from their sessions.
Rachael remembers, “When we went to Jonathan’s, it became like a choose-your-own-adventure for everyone. Everyone got to decide what would be best for them. And what I liked about that process is that I think it stayed extremely true to our mission in that it was very intuitive and fun and what we call ‘fuego’. It’s this term we use that means ‘let’s just try stuff’. It was very loose and very fun, and very beautiful. We were happy all day.” Bridget adds, “I think on the second session we were a little more lenient with the rules that we had imposed for ourselves. While we wanted to get that magic of us playing together, we realized it’s not gonna be any less magic if I’m wearing headphones and I can hear the bass really well. It might actually be more magic that way. We shifted to figuring out what each of us needs to achieve max fuego.” Calabrese agrees, “It was a good lesson, too. It’s like, when you have a mission or a principle, you hold onto it and it guides you. And then at some point, holding onto it becomes a burden. I think keeping as many firsts in our process seems to work. I mean, sometimes you swing and you miss but it’s kinda cool because you get this other thing. For us it was a reminder to follow our instinct.”
Lake Street Dive’s instincts have led them here: an album that is a document of shared moments of being in the moment, and finding the joy and freedom of sharing that with their fans. This is not only the most live album they have ever made, but also the most ALIVE. Akie Bermiss puts it this way: “It may not be perfect, but it grows in its own soil. It feels like it’s a finished thing, but it still has the potential to grow. It’s a living, breathing thing, like an organism, not a relic of last year. It’s a testament to the band being alive now.”
This might be the only place. So what about friends making music together? What about Lake Street Dive? What About Flamingos?