Songbook: Volume Three

(One of a continuing series…)

Songbook: Dave Matthews Band “The Best of What’s Around”

I have this strange love/hate relationship with the Dave Matthews Band. I can still remember hearing What Would You Say the first time in ’94 and going, “Wow, this is a really good Blues Traveler song.” Then I realized that it wasn’t Blues Traveler but this band that I had never heard of and running to a record store to pick up the disc. (Yes, you used to go to a store and there were things called records.) The disc was unlike anything that I had heard before.

So I became one of the advocates for the band. I told everyone in school to listen to them, wore the t-shirt around campus, all before Dave Matthews became Dave Matthews. It was like being part of a secret society. Now I had called some musical trends early in the past. I told people that the Spin Doctors were going to be huge because their disc had three killer songs on them. Nine months later during which those songs were played every fifteen minutes I also called the fact that the entire nation was going to wake up and go, “Why the hell are we listening to the Spin Doctors?” All of this is my way of saying that I knew Dave Matthews was going to be big before he became a household name.

The thing is, once he became a household name I began to like him less and less. Sure the music was still great and the band was innovative but I couldn’t like a band with a football stadium of people also liking the band. It was one of those moments where you realize that the guys who picked on you in high school are now claiming your favorite band as their favorite band and that simply isn’t fair. So, you do what I do and become a music snob and call Dave Matthews “music suburban people listen to so that they can call themselves eclectic” and then spend the next several years following bands that I personally own 0.5% of all the CDs that they’ve ever sold.

But darn it, the songs are still good and I’ll always like The Best of What’s Around. How can you not like a song that starts off “Well my friend it seems your eyes are troubled.” This is the song that made me go, “These guys are special.” It’s a simple song and an upbeat song with the main theme being life is much better than you’re giving it credit for. And no matter how many times over the past decade that I’ve listened to this song, no matter how much crap I give the band, I hear this song and I have to take a step back and think for a minute.

Because basically everything that I have been writing about for months is addressed in this song and I’ve spent a lot of cycles trying to figure something out when the answer has been sitting in my CD case the entire time. There aren’t many songs that will make you do that but this is one of them. It isn’t a hit but it is a song that matters and trust me, that means something in this world.

Have a good weekend everyone.