The albums of the Dave Matthews Band balance between joy and fear. On the home front, with partner and family, the songs find affection, fun and ease. Beyond, the wider world holds strife and fear. And looking inside can be just as unsettling.
“Walk Around the Moon,” the band’s 10th studio album, opens with the title track, swinging to the beat and exulting in a relationship that saved the grateful singer: “You gave me everything / Now I’m flying into this kaleidoscopic dream. But that dream doesn’t last long; next is a song about school shootings.”Madman’s Eyes” is set to an ominous, Middle Eastern-tinged modal riff and backed by a moaning string orchestra, as Matthews cries, “Don’t sacrifice another child!”
More than most rock songwriters — especially in the jam band realm where he’s been storming for three decades — Matthews, 58, is leaning towards an adult. He is an unabashed dad rocker, a proud parent who has long thought and worried about the well-being of his children and that of future generations. In “Something to Tell My Baby,” a waltz backed only by his acoustic guitar and a few strings, Matthews muses on how fleeting life can be. maybe make things easier.
“Walk Around the Moon” is the band’s first studio album since 2018, and the first since their longtime violinist, Boyd Tinsley, left the band and was sued for sexual harassment by a musician on a side project; the case was settled in 2019.
The sound of the band was already changing and deepening. On the 1990s albums, Matthews’ guitar—often acoustic—was the band’s only chordal instrument, joined in light-fingered counterpoint by saxophone, fiddle, bass, and drums for staccato grooves that blended folk, funk, and jazz. Over the years, as audiences grew to arena format, the band was bolstered with keyboards, electric guitar and horns, increasingly powerful, heavier and brass. (Tinsley’s replacement is a trumpeter, Rashawn Ross.) But the band’s founding rhythm section — Carter Beauford on drums and Stefan Lessard on bass — still keeps the songs nimble no matter how taxed Matthews’ thoughts can become.
“I’m down in this hole again,” he sings in “Looking for a Vein,” comparing himself to a miner who works compulsively. “What if I hit it / be rich like I want to be?” he muses over a dragging six-beat guitar lick. “Will it set me free / Or just be another hole to dig?” In “The Only Thing,” over a booming electric guitar riff referencing Led Zeppelin, Matthews is desperate to “Crawl out of this skin I’m living in/Crawl out of my head.” And in “Monsters,” a reverberating ballad with a sputtering double undercurrent, he tries to reassure a child—or possibly himself—that the “monsters in your head” aren’t real.
In these new songs, love, or even the possibility of love, solves many problems: the fear in “Monsters,” the self-loathing in “The Only Thing.” Other tracks – “After Everything” and “Break Free” – gently celebrate love going right, emotionally and carnally, with Matthews promising devotion as full-tilt horn sections ring out his joy.
But he is well aware that love, in a happy domestic atmosphere, is only an individual refuge, not a global solution. “The world is going in all directions/Like bottles shattering on the floor,” he sings in the elegiac “All You Ever Wanted Was Tomorrow.” And he closes the album on acoustic guitar alone with “Singing From the Windows”. The song imagines being during a siege, thinking “when the war is over” as you watch fires and hear sirens.
“None of us know what’s coming tomorrow,” he sings. “So dance with me like the time we borrowed.” Private comfort in the midst of a public catastrophe – it’s only modest comfort, but that’s all.
Dave Matthews band
“Walk Around the Moon”
(Bama Rags/RCA)
