But in music, as in life, things are most interesting when there’s tension — in this case, between the dark and the light — and nowhere is that tension more evident, or more rewarding, than on Dave Matthews Band’s third studio album, 1998’s Before These Crowded Streets.
The record, which marks its 25th anniversary on April 28, endures as the band’s masterpiece, using its predecessors (1994’s Under the Table and Dreaming and 1996’s Crash) as a springboard to a project more musically sophisticated, thematically rich and emotionally charged than any album the band has subsequently released. (The band’s 10th studio album, the John Alagia-produced Walk Around the Moon, drops May 19.)
If Dreaming announced the arrival of a nearly fully formed new rock band to the world, and Crash found a near-ideal balance between the studio and the stage, Streets took all of it up a notch, and found the artistic riches in grappling with complex emotions within the context of rock songs that, then as now, feel like little else in heavy rotation. (It’s almost amusing to go back and realize, through reports at the time, that Streets debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, dislodging the ubiquitous soundtrack to James Cameron’s film Titanic, a slot it had held for four months.)
Indeed, there’s a sense of the quintet — singer-songwriter-guitarist Matthews, drummer Carter Beauford, bassist Stefan Lessard, violinist Boyd Tinsley and saxophonist LeRoi Moore — reaching the apex of its formidable skills throughout the 70-minute, 11-song collection.
This is a band that famously built its reputation in the early 1990s on mind-boggling live performances and an affinity for stitching together a multiplicity of genres — that fluid, ferocious sensibility blossoms again and again throughout Streets.
With the ability to take the music in any direction the band chooses, there’s a giddy sense of freedom, albeit one underpinned by a fascinating current of cynicism, anger and regret.
There are sunny, endorphin-overload songs such as the exuberant, carpe diem anthem “Stay (Wasting Time)” juxtaposed with harrowing epics such as “Halloween” and grim dispatches such as “The Last Stop.”
Matthews also dramatically expands his horizons as a songwriter, moving from the personal to the more political.
There are sunny, endorphin-overload songs such as the exuberant, carpe diem anthem “Stay (Wasting Time)” juxtaposed with harrowing epics such as “Halloween” and grim dispatches such as “The Last Stop."
tweet this
“Don’t Drink the Water” is a sinister, majestic excoriation of genocide in service of societal expansion (“All I can say to you my new neighbor/Is you must move on or I will bury you”), while “The Last Stop” bemoans wars waged in the name of religion (“Go ahead, believe that you are the chosen one”) and “The Dreaming Tree” laments the sacrifice of nature to progress (“The air is growing thick; a fear, he cannot hide; the dreaming tree has died”).
Some of that freshness is likely attributable to the band, for the first time, writing the songs in the studio, rather than working through an existing stockpile.
“This time, we booked the studio before I even started writing any songs, so the pressure was on,” Matthews told MTV in a 1998 behind-the-scenes documentary. The fleeting sonic interstitials between most songs here often serve as either palate cleanser or transition, and further cement the idea of Streets as a piece of work conceived as a whole.
There is also, for the first time, an extended array of guest performers augmenting the band’s tight, polyglot sound: Bela Fleck and his banjo turn up, as do Alanis Morissette, the Kronos Quartet and vocalists Tawatha Agee, Cindy Myzell and Brenda White-King.
So elastic is the Dave Matthews Band’s sound that it easily encompasses one of the biggest pop stars on the planet at that time and a critically acclaimed, avant-garde string quartet without making either end of that sonic spectrum feel forced.
“We wanted to make [Streets] a melting pot,” Lessard told MTV at the time.
While the tension between light and dark strikes an ideal balance throughout Streets, thanks in no small part to producer Steve Lillywhite, who was overseeing his third consecutive DMB record, the band, which saw several tracks become hits, including the jazzy “Crush,” would venture even further into darkness for the follow-up.
An abundance of myth has sprung up around what’s now colloquially known as 2001’s The Lillywhite Sessions, but if the leaked material recorded in the wake of Streets is any indication, Matthews and his collaborators would have followed this bracingly realized collection of songs with some of its most bleak work ever.
Much of what’s made it out into the world — songs like the astonishing “Bartender” or “Grace Is Gone” or “Big Eyed Fish” — indicates the vein of thoughtful, challenging songwriting begun on Streets was a rich one for Matthews to mine. (Most of the Lillywhite Sessions was ultimately reworked for the 2002 LP Busted Stuff.) But with far less light balancing things out, the cumulative effect, while powerful, is ultimately suffocating.
Consequently, the Dave Matthews Band pulled back and struck out in an entirely different direction, jettisoning Lillywhite and teaming up with A-list pop producer Glen Ballard for 2001’s Everyday, a polarizing album in the DMB canon, not least for its 3-minute, radio-friendly songs and near-complete absence of band interplay.
If Streets best illustrates the value of tension between light and dark, Everyday is the depiction of what happens when darkness is almost totally banished.
The band has weathered losses in recent years — Moore died from the results of a tragic accident in 2008, while Tinsley departed the band in 2018 under a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations — and eventually reunited with Lillywhite for 2012’s Away from the World.
Still, the acclaimed band has never again scaled the studio heights it reached with Before These Crowded Streets.
With each passing year, Dave Matthews and his collaborators have further burnished their deserved reputation as one of the finest live acts in modern music, even as their studio albums, now almost an afterthought to the touring juggernaut (which will stop at Dallas’ Dos Equis Pavilion on May 20), feel more like placeholders than passionate artistic statements.
