If I haven’t mentioned it here before, I’m a huge Dave Matthews Band fan. I have been since I was pretty young, when I first heard my older sister blasting them in her room. Back then I would take any excuse to leave my room when I was doing my homework and to argue with my sister, so I took the opportunity of hearing loud sounds coming from her room to go and yell at her. Instead of doing that, though, I wound up really liking what she was listening to, and we listened to Dave Matthews for a couple of hours. Don’t worry. I still got my homework done that night.
What I like most about them is how dynamic they are as a band. There are so many instruments, and ones that aren’t always together especially in a typical popular band, so they wind up having a really unique sound among the musical environment in which you typically hear them, like on the radio. I also really like funk music, and there is something reminiscent, though certainly not the same, about them since they have a big band with many different instruments. I especially like the addition of the violin, which you don’t find too much of in pop music, nor even in most bands with a brass player or brass section. I think the bass player deserves special acknowledgement. He is really good.
As a young musician myself, I always wonder what a band like Dave Matthews Band was like when they were starting out. I have not looked into their biography and history yet, so I don’t know, but am definitely curious. I like to imagine great bands and singers in their early days, going to open mics and playing shows at bars and things like that. I always wonder if their shows back then were really good, and everyone liked them right away, or if they had a bunch of lousy shows sometimes. I bet it was a combination of both.