The most famous lyric in “Crash Into Me,” Dave Matthews Band’s breakout love song from 1996, was a mistake. After recording several takes, Matthews added a throwaway line as a joke: “Hike up your skirt a little more and show your world to me.” It made the final cut, of course, and the song would forever be read as a tale of lust rather than desire. “It’s the song of a 26-year-old or 25-year-old,” he recently told GQ. “Now I’m a 56-year-old, and that changes what you want to sing about.” These days, Matthews is more concerned with impermanence as liberation and themes that distill the long-running mindfulness of his music. On Walk Around the Moon, the band’s 10th studio album, he turns those subjects into surprisingly pretty odes, tapping into his gentler side with the wisdom and grace afforded by age.
If you’re expecting the classic attributes of Dave Matthews Band—crunchy grooves, dueling horns and violin, Matthews’ imitable, guttural singing—then Walk Around the Moon will come as a surprise. In the five years since they released the dull but optimistic Come Tomorrow, Dave Matthews Band have seen their children pack their bags for college, the George Floyd protesters strive for justice, and the world confront the precarity of health. With big change comes thankfulness for anything that’s stayed reliable; that might explain the comparatively restrained approach on Walk Around the Moon. The band forgoes its most flamboyant instrumentation and scales back to a grounded, almost meditative, core. With the bulk of the album aligning with triple-A soft-rock, the quietness that permeates these songs gives their themes of reflection a chilling air: the sobering reality of the pandemic on “Singing From the Windows,” learning to forfeit control on the trumpet-dotted “The Ocean and the Butterfly.” Seven members round out the lineup, the most at any time in their history, but the group has never sounded so reserved.
Past and present iterations of Dave Matthews Band freely intermingle on Walk Around the Moon. As always, Matthews confronts death and loss, but there’s a sense he’s learned something new about it this time around. A handful of tracks have been massaged for years on the road or pulled from the vault: “Monsters,” a wistful, bass-forward dose of nostalgia, is nearly a decade old. They’ve been playing “Break Free” live for 17 years, the late LeRoi Moore living on through his work as a composer and lyricist on the soulful track. Bootleggers’ enthusiasm aside, these two songs are highlights for the band as storytellers; revisiting your former self with acceptance, and potentially forgiveness, is hard, especially if you’re prone to embarrassing one-liners.