Music Therapy

A recharged and rejuvenated Dave Matthews Band brings its top-drawing live act to South Florida

By Alan Sculley

The Dave Matthews Band performs at 7 p.m. July 11 at the Cruzan Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach.

When the Dave Matthews Band headed into the recording of its 2005 album Stand Up, one of the group’s goals was to find ways to reinvigorate itself through the way it approached the making of the CD.

The band found fresh inspiration in teaming up with Mark Batson, a producer known for his work in hip-hop and R&B. Batson encouraged the group to play together in the studio to develop the songs for Stand Up into their final form, often joining in on keyboards in the process.

But in talking to violinist Boyd Tinsley in a mid-May phone interview, it’s clear that the group feels even more rejuvenated by the music that’s been written for the CD it hopes to release next spring or summer.

Tinsley’s enthusiasm was unmistakable as he talked about the recent songwriting/pre-production session in Seattle that has the band on track to begin recording after its tour this summer.

“I’d say, like, not as far as the songs are concerned in particular, but like the mood and the vibe of it feels like Under the Table and Dreaming and Crash,” Tinsley said, referring to Dave Matthews Band’s first two major label albums. “It feels like the beginning again, but the music is just a lot different. It’s just like the whole excitement of starting something new, starting something fresh, feels like those first couple of albums.”

Getting to this point for Tinsley and his bandmates — singer/guitarist Dave Matthews, bassist Stefan Lessard, drummer Carter Beauford and saxophonist LeRoi Moore — has not been quick or without a few difficulties.

The group actually started working on new material in 2006 and had reteamed with Batson to begin recording. Tinsley was a little fuzzy on exactly what transpired with that first attempt at a new album, but the band pulled the plug on the project.

“Mark Batson’s a great guy. He’s a great producer, a great musician,” Tinsley said. “There’s nothing about Mark that was the reason why we didn’t finish the album. I think one reason, there were probably many, but I think one of the reasons was just maybe the timing was not right for us. That was not the time to do the album and this is. But it had nothing to do with Mark.

“You know, it might have just been that, at that time, the band just wasn’t — honestly, I can’t even remember; it might have been a combination of maybe we didn’t find that music, we didn’t find that sound that sparked our creativity,” Tinsley added. “And maybe we just didn’t even feel like being in the studio at that time. It might have been a combination of both.”
So the group left the first batch of songs on the shelf and returned to its home base of Charlottesville to start anew.

The band changed producers and hired Rob Cavallo, who’s well-known for producing Green Day’s American Idiot, among other projects.

The band also took a new approach to writing for the album, with all five members getting together to jam and build songs from the ground up from musical ideas that surfaced as they played. Once in Seattle, this process continued as the group wrote and refined the songs that form the backbone of the new record.

“Throughout the whole experience, we were all together,” Tinsley said. “We came up with ideas all the way through writing songs, literally, and that’s something we’ve never done before. It’s really been a pretty amazing experience doing it.”

The enthusiasm Tinsley expressed for the new songs would seem to augur well for the next stage in a career that has seen the Dave Matthews Band grow into one of rock’s most consistently successful bands and one of the industry’s top-drawing live acts.

Since bursting into the mainstream in 1994 with Under the Table and Dreaming, the group has enjoyed one blockbuster album after another with such releases as Crash (1996), Everyday (2001), Busted Stuff (2002) and Stand Up.

The band’s summer tour features multiple shows at large outdoor amphitheaters in a number of markets, as well as stadium shows in several cities.

Tinsley said the band is likely to trot out some nuggets from its back catalog in its live show. He also said the group might even debut a few of the songs slated for the new CD.

“Every year, we sort of try to bring back some songs that we haven’t done in a few years and sort of revisit them, and sort of put them back into the repertoire of what we do that summer,” Tinsley said. “Even as the summer progresses, we’ll start going back and adding new songs into the set.”

The Dave Matthews Band performs at 7 p.m. July 11 at the Cruzan Amphitheatre, 601-7 Sansbury’s Way, West Palm Beach. Tickets are $32-$67 and can be purchased at www.ticketmaster.com or www.livenation.com.

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