Dave Matthews Band Recently

With the release of their new album 'Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King' coming up on June 2nd, Dave Matthews sat down for an interview with Entertainment Weekly where he explains that the band nearly broke up a couple years ago, before LeRoi Moore's ultimately fatal accident occurred. He feels that the band had started to lose itself way back in 1998, during the recording of 'Before These Crowded Streets', only just recently finding its way.

This is very interesting to read 11 years on, as I'd been a huge fan of DMB in the mid-90s and gone out and picked up 'Before These Crowded Streets' as a sophomore in collge as soon as it was released. I remember listening to it in the dining hall on my Discman and thinking that it lacked some of the magic of prior records. While there are some very good tracks on it (Dreaming Tree), many did not meet the high standard that I'd set for the band after 'Under the Table and Dreaming' and 'Crash' had set the soundtrack for my high school years. Any album material I've heard of theirs since then, aside from the fantastic Matthews solo debut 'Some Devil', none of which I have purchased, hasn't sounded like the same band I had come to love previously.

So if this new album is in fact a return to form of the mid-90s for the band, it would be very welcome from me. I'm looking forward to hearing it. Probably won't buy it though.

Read the EW interview here.