Busted Stuff

Sound DNA

• Alt/Indie
• Alternative Rock

• warm
• earnest
• pastoral

About

When the Dave Matthews Band released <i>Everyday</i> in early 2001, the group’s allegiant fanbase erupted with indignation. A year earlier, Matthews and his bandmates had shelved their sessions with Steve Lillywhite, the producer who’d helmed the triptych of records that made the group major attractions. It was a dark period for the band, with Matthews’ depression exacerbated by drinking, and by an inner-group dynamic that suddenly seemed both tense and listless. During dual month-long breaks from a grueling road itinerary, Matthews decamped to California, writing and recording the bulk of a concise pop-rock album with Glen Ballard, who’d overseen Alanis Morissette’s titanic breakthrough five years earlier. Diehards balked at the results of the Matthews-Ballard partnership, which featured baritone electric guitar and swift songs that seemed like direct-to-radio bait. The scuttlebutt mounted when, a week after the release of <i>Everyday</i>, those discarded “Lillywhite Sessions” surfaced online as a wildly popular bootleg. They were everything <i>Everyday</i> was not—exploratory, unbound, acoustic. For a band that had risen in no small part due to the goodwill and word-of-mouth of its fanbase, the members of the Dave Matthews Band now faced a difficult decision: Do they turn their back on the illicit tunes people loved, or just sell what everyone was already sharing? They smartly split the difference, returning to the California studio where they’d made <i>Before These Crowded Streets</i> to get takes they actually liked—with two new tunes, for good measure. The result, 2002’s <i>Busted Stuff</i>, is one of the band’s finest studio hours, as Matthews and his players approach their earlier discards with the vim and vision to get them right. The polarizing <i>Everyday</i> served them well—teaching the band members how to quickly get to the center of a song and hold fast there; suddenly, the group’s looseness had sensible limits. The elegiac beauty “Grace is Gone,” for instance, stays simple, its verses emptying like a river into a chorus that is an ocean of grief. Its companion piece, the single “Where Are You Going,” explores existential doubt, but answers with constancy, an idea reiterated by one of the band’s most straightforward and charming arrangements ever. But, of course, this is the Dave Matthews Band, so things get busy and wild in time. With its pizzicato bustle and sizzling electric lead, “Kit Kat Jam” is a militantly muscular instrumental, while the 12-string beauty “Grey Street” seems haunted, even as it surges into its tremendous hook. And the closing track, “Bartender,” is an eight-and-a-half-minute epic, its violin drone and baritone saxophones suggesting swans finding some tenderness. The Lillywhite Sessions were the right songs at the wrong time; in revisiting them after the fetid air had cleared, the Dave Matthews Band fixed whatever stuff was busted.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits