The Magnificent Seven: Before These Crowded Streets
This is the fourth in a series of articles that looks at seven albums the authors appreciate. In terms of criteria: they must be albums listened to only in their entirety…content and form together like houses in motion. They also must have enormous personal relevance: they are corner stones. They may not be cool, but they are us.
#4
Before These Crowded Streets, Dave Matthews Band
It’s no coincidence that Pat and I both wrote about Dave Matthews Band for this month’s Magnificent Seven. We’re getting to the biggies. The seminal, formative stuff. And we knew this day would come. DMB Day. No qualifying, no excuses. I still have a Dave Matthews poster on the wall at my parents’ house. I am because of years of listening to Dave Matthews Band.
Trying to pick one album to represent this connection has been hard. Like the other vital bands in my life, they are a fixture and each album (pre-Busted Stuff, anyway) defined different contours of my adolescence.[1]
“Typical Situation” is my favorite Dave Matthews Band song and “Ants Marching” probably his most profound, (I also deeply love “Two Step”). But when I think about truly determining songs, music that shaped who I am, it is Before These Crowded Streets.
I was 12. Purely in my head. I did a lot of homework. I swam a lot. Feelings were starting to swirl but I didn’t know where they came from, what they looked like, what they meant and, most importantly, how to put them into words. And then I heard “Crush.”
I remember listening to it over and over again, probably hundreds of times. The first was when I played the album on Christmas morning on my new silver disc man and wrap around headphones, the kind that hooked around my big ears. I remember sinking into a chair while my Mom and Dad made orange rolls, feeling like I had tapped into this well of emotion. I had never heard anything so intense.
It would be years before I would experience those rapturous moments described in “Crush,” to want nothing more than to “drink some wine ‘til we get drunk” with someone and to think if “tomorrow could be so wondrous as you, there, sleeping.” But I had found something, an articulation of an experience, affirmations of feelings, a map for my wild and young heart. I didn’t know exactly what was being described in “Rapunzel,” or if I even knew how to want it, but it was there.
Before These Crowded Streets made sense of my new torrential feelings, gave them order, told me they were ok, or better than ok: they should be celebrated. Dave Matthews isn’t afraid to put words to those feelings and I think that’s why people love him.
The album is playful and passionate about everything, not just the heart. Classic Dave Man. My young mind was shaped by“The Last Stop” and “Don’t Drink the Water,” driving and mesmerizing tunes with important messages. I listen to “The Stone” probably more than any other DMB song. I find it hypnotic and mysterious, the other side of the more buoyant and joyous expressions of love on the rest of the album. The whole thing is earnest beyond belief, so earnest you can’t look at it head on. Elemental, simultaneously profound and simple. So deep it is all obvious. You get the idea.
Key Tracks: Pantala Naga Pampa, Stay (Wasting Time), The Stone, Crush
Emma Impink appreciates saving concert tickets...
I did listen to 2003’s Some Devil pretty intensely, a truly excellent solo project and a great collection of songs; “You used to laugh under the covers, maybe not so often now. The way I used to laugh with you, it was loud and hard.” come on.