Singer Rachael Price has been coming to the Twin Cities so often she might as well have a timeshare condo.
“We really should, we love it there,” said Price, who will appear with her side project, Rachael & Vilray, Thursday at the Dakota. She’ll return in September with her main gig, the Minneapolis-rooted Lake Street Dive. On the later trip, the Brooklyn-based singer will bring her daughter Jupiter, now 10 months old.
That way she can show her daughter all the formative spots for Lake Street Dive. Like bandmate Mike “McDuck” Olson’s parents’ house in St. Louis Park where the band practiced. Like the Bryant Lake Bowl, which inspired the band’s moniker. Like the Minnesota State Fair grandstand where the band last headlined here.
“We used to spend quite a bit of time there,” Price said last week. “As a young band, we played hours and hours of badminton in McDuck’s folks’ backyard. We drove around the Twin Cities. We feel very fondly about Minneapolis.”
Olson gave them a tour of Lake Street (he quit the band in 2021) as did the Lake Street Council on one of the group’s recent trips to Minneapolis.
This week, Price will bring her quieter act, Rachael & Vilray, to play the 1930s and ’40s styled jazz originals written by Vilray Bolles, her guitar-playing partner.
“Rachael & Vilray scratches my itch in singing lyrics in an intentional and sometimes theatrical way,” Price said. “Sometimes the intention of rock and soul is more about the feel. With Lake Street Dive, it feels like a massive energy ball we’re tossing back and forth with the audience. With Rachael & Vilray, it’s just the two of us. I talk a lot more. We’re conversing with each other and we’re talking to the audience. There’s a ton of jokes. My personality is more on display that way.”
And Price favors different wardrobes for the two gigs — dresses with Vilray and “almost always pants with Lake Street Dive mostly ’cause I need to dance around a lot more.”
Met at a music college
Price and Bolles met in a dorm as students at the New England Conservatory of Music in 2003.
“It was the first week of jazz school. Everyone was a little self-conscious and shy,” Price said. “We didn’t become good friends immediately.”
Bolles hit it off with dormmate Mike Calabrese and “they had inside jokes from the first day and they wrote a lot of silly, fun songs.” They formed a little band with Olson and invited Price to rehearsal to sing a song.
“It was a silly western country song about reincarnation,” she recalled. “We [Bolles and she] were friends after that point.”
And with Calabrese and Olson, she formed Lake Street Dive in 2004. They have released seven albums and three EPs. Rachael & Vilray have been a duo for eight years, though in the first two years all their gigs were in New York. They released a self-titled album in 2019 and dropped their sophomore effort, “I Love a Love Song,” last year.
It features 11 Bolles originals, the most striking of which is “Hate Is the Basis (of Love).” What did Price think of it when he sent her a voice memo?
“He specifically wanted me to weigh in on the lyric ‘she listens while I bitch.’ His wife had given him feedback that ‘you’re creating a stereotype of women whining.’ We had to make sure that he sang that line. He’s the bitchy one, and I’m the one who listens. I loved the song immediately.”
That song was a commission from a person who had the concept. When Bolles writes, he tells Price about what he was thinking.
“He’s a man of great specificity: ‘This is a song I’d envision Peggy Lee singing in the soft, quiet part of her range and basically whisper it and go from there.’ Or ‘This is a song Fred Astaire would sing to Ginger Rogers at this point in a movie, so you need to swing it like Fred Astaire would swing it.’
“He’s like my director,” she said of the composer who also writes instrumentals inspired by spaghetti western movies, “and I get to be the lead actor.”
The new album features one cover, the standard “Goodnight My Love,” a tune both Price and Bolles grew up singing.
“He grew up with the Ella Fitzgerald version and I learned it from this Shirley Temple movie [1936′s ‘Stowaway’], and also the Sarah Vaughan version was definitive for me. We started singing it at the end of our shows.”
Grew up on old jazz
Price, 38, has been listening to old music since she was very young. Born in Australia, she moved to Nashville at age 3, and her father was a choir director.
“Ella was my first love. We had a CD and my dad got me all her songbooks — Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart. I listened to those CDs constantly. By the time I was 10, I was singing 30 songs from the American songbook repertoire. I watched a lot of old movie musicals with Doris Day and Judy Garland. I was in an intense early jazz bubble till I was older.”
Then as a teen, Price became interested in Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men and later D’Angelo and Lauryn Hill, which informed her singing with Lake Street Dive.
She and Bolles love old musicals. They drove around Colorado recently for four days listening only to Stephen Sondheim musicals.
They are in the midst of a delayed album release tour for “I Love a Love Song,” which was released in January 2023. And the tour ends in Minneapolis. Two days later Price will be in Tampa for some Lake Street Dive festival performances, with baby Jupiter — and some pants — in tow.
By Jon Bream Star Tribune
FEB 15 • 6:30 + 8:30PM
THESE SHOWS ARE SOLD OUT