funny the way it is

Interesting piece from CBS News covering the upcoming (and long-awaited) release of Big Whiskey... by Dave Matthews Band. The DMB are funny proposition, certainly on this side of the pond: you love them, you hate them, or (the majority) you've never heard of them. Yet, as the piece points out, they've grossed nearly half a billion dollars on the road.

[Edit: took down the embedded video because the auto-start couldn't be disabled: cheers, CBS. You can watch the great report by clicking here.]

I've been a devotee for about ten years are so, but still have never seen the whole group live, although I was lucky enough to catch dave and Tim Reynolds doing the acoustic stuff a couple of years ago. One of my personal connections with the music is that each record brings a canon of songs self-contained, as if theme and techniques change each time Dave sits down to write; like the Beatles for my generation, each album sounds completely new.

The whole of Big Whiskey and the Groogrux King is streaming already, as it has been for the last week or so, on Pandora: click here to listen. The poignancy of the death of founding member LeRoi Moore last year (see Into The Great Light", August 20th 2008) only adds to how brilliant his opening solo is - worth the effort. Lead single, Funny The Way It Is is also a bit of a barnstormer. The rest of the album is a grower for sure, but after three or four times through already, I'm hooked and can't wait until I can get the physical release (by import, most likely.)

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