The studio album that wasn’t meant to be finally is. On the eve of a national tour of North American stadiums, which brings the Dave Matthews Band to Soldier Field on Friday and Saturday, Matthews’ “The Lillywhite Sessions” surfaced on the Internet, apparently without the singer’s authorization, and has become something of a cause celebre among Matthews aficionados.
They’re asserting in chat rooms on the Web that the 12-song disc, the product of an aborted recording session last year with longtime producer Steve Lillywhite, is better than “Everyday” (RCA), the studio album Matthews eventually put out in its place last February.
I’d go a step further. Not only is “The Lillywhite Sessions” better than “Everyday,” which has already sold 2 million copies, it’s the best Matthews album ever. Whereas “Everyday” paired Matthews with hitmeister-for-hire Glen Ballard (Alanis Morissette, Aerosmith) to produce as lifeless a piece of corporate pop product as Matchbox Twenty or Train could ever manufacture, the aborted “Lillywhite Sessions” achieves what all of Matthews’ previous four studio releases and his myriad concert recordings couldn’t: make the case for the Dave Matthews Band as a subtle, serious, song-driven groove band.
Don’t mistake this as an endorsement of Matthews as a Great Artist, on a par with Kurt Cobain, P.J. Harvey, Moby or the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne in the last decade’s pantheon; he isn’t even on par with Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots when it comes to cranking out radio-friendly guilty pleasures. His success in the last decade says more about the power vacuum in mainstream rock than it does about Matthews’ middle-tier talent.
One longtime Matthews listener ascribes the singer’s astonishing, multimillion-selling success to his bland, background-listening utility. Walk through any college dorm, he suggests, and hear Dave’s CDs purring from every room. “It’s perfect laundry-folding music.”
But “The Lillywhite Sessions” proves there is life to this band outside the Laundromat. Matthews described the sessions in an interview from his home, in Charlottesville , Va., just before heading out on tour last summer, giving a great deal of insight into the album’s intimate tone.
“It’s very close to be being done,” Matthews said of the Lillywhite sessions, which at that point he intended to release as his fifth studio album. “It’s got something relaxed about it, because we’re doing it at home, so it’s got a lot of sitting-outside-on-the-porch sound to it, taking walks and playing Frisbee and throwing footballs around. That’s not so much in the style or the topics, but it comes out in the feel. Overall, it’s more acoustic and we’re recording in a circle, just the five of us looking at each other. There is more space in the arrangements, less improvising. This album is more straightforward, melancholy, which is a good thing on a rainy day.”
It sounded like a refreshing change, away from the busy-ness of past Matthews efforts and their clunky merger of two easily abused styles: the sensitive, singer-songwriter introspection of acoustic folk, epitomized by Matthews’ marble-voiced emoting, and the instrumental noodling of jazz-fusion, frequently abused by the Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum of the Matthews Band, saxophonist LeRoi Moore and violinist Boyd Tinsley.
So it was something of a shock when Matthews returned from his 2000 summer tour, shelved “The Lillywhite Sessions” and flew to Los Angeles to work on songs with Ballard, master of the verse-chorus Insta-hit approach to record-making.
Matthews’ band — Moore, Tinsley, drummer Carter Beauford and bassist Stefan Lessard — joined the sessions only after the songs had been written and arranged, and “Everyday” makes them sound like Everyband, an anonymous collection of session musicians. The solo-free songs are a mixed blessing: Though some discipline was long overdue in Matthews’ arrangements, Ballard takes it too far in the opposite direction, sacrificing the band’s quirks and personality in the interest of crafting an album that lowest-common-denominator commercial radio programmers would embrace.
The Ballard formula has worked, but at a heavy price. “The Space Between” could emerge as Matthews’ biggest hit ever, but it’s the kind of power ballad that even Whitesnake or Foreigner might have rejected as too formulaic.
“The Lillywhite Sessions,” in contrast, is shaped by restraint and the finest, most nuanced vocal performances and most consistently memorable melodies Matthews has ever recorded. His baritone evokes Peter Gabriel at his smokiest, a mixture of gravity and grace on “Digging a Ditch,” and he lifts the mood and even a few bits of lyric inspiration from Gabriel’s “Red Rain” on “JTR (John the Revelator).”
Fabric of the song
Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum weave sax and violin into the fabric of the songs, rather than trying to blow through them, and Beauford –though once again utterly unable to move past a midtempo shimmy — remains Matthews’ foil, his snare fills and expertly shaded cymbal work responding like a second voice to Matthews’ vocals, especially on “Monkey Man.”
Matthews said he shelved “The Lillywhite Sessions” because he found the album too downcast. Indeed, the songs are replete with the darkest imagery the singer has ever negotiated, but at times the tone raises the artistic ante.
“Grace is Gone” approaches the haunted air of classic country murder ballads such as “Long Black Veil,” which Matthews has occasionally performed in concert, and “Bartender” builds to a desperate wail that feels earned, given the crisis of conscience that precedes it. Alas, Matthews sometimes still doesn’t know when to quit when he’s ahead: “Bartender” wanks on for 10 minutes, 5 of which are anticlimactic.
Exception to the rule
But the coda of “Bartender” is an exception. “The Lillywhite Sessions” doesn’t sound like more of the same from America’s favorite happy-go-lucky jam band. Instead it sounds like it could have been an artistic turning point.
But, according to a profile in Rolling Stone magazine, Matthews was talked out of releasing it after the band’s representative at RCA told the singer “I’m not feeling this record as a fan”–record-company double-talk that essentially means, “I don’t hear any hits.”
If the quote is accurate, it shows once again how myopic and bottom-line conscious the record industry has become, because on “The Lillywhite Sessions” the Dave Matthews Band has never sounded like more of a band. On “Everyday,” it has never sounded like less of one. How crushing to realize that Matthews was essentially bullied out of following his artistic instincts and led straight into the lair of Glen Ballard — whose ruthless, suffer-no-solos-gladly approach couldn’t be further from the easygoing slackness of previous Matthews Band releases.
Thanks to the Internet pirates who pried “The Lillywhite Sessions” from obscurity, his fans have the opportunity to hear Matthews in his darkest — and finest — hour. And those of us who never gave Matthews a second thought, particularly after the “Everyday” disaster, now have reason to reconsider.
