dave.

my itunes library has grown by leaps and bounds in the last three days. i added 33 albums since yesterday. seven of those were cds i'd had in my collection for a long time, and all the rest were from four different area libraries around my house. awesome.

i want to talk about those seven albums from my collection. they were all the dave matthews related albums i've bought or burned over the years. i don't know why it's taken me so long to add them to my library; i've had them all since at least the release of some devil, cause that was one of the ones i had purchased. ever since i stopped listening to some devil, my whole dmb phase just kind of ended. and i mean really ended; that album came out in 2003 and once i was done absorbing it, maybe six months later or so, i didn't listen to them at all until now. i'm not sure why, i think i just kind of became jaded with the whole "dave" phenomenon.

the dave matthews band was one of the very first secular bands of real musicians making quality music that i was really into. and for like two years i was really into them; i listened to them more than anybody. on a few of the road trips in spain we took, we listened to dmb and i still knew almost all the lyrics from those albums, even after nearly 6 years. i had learned guitar parts, lyrics, really dissected these albums. and it was in '02 that i discovered john mayer and really started going down a whole different musical road.

i'm not sure why i went on a 6 year hiatus from dmb. i think a huge part of it was the other stuff i was getting into. i really dug myself into john mayer's music, and from there went to eric clapton and even more so to stevie ray vaughan, and stevie ray took me to jimi hendrix. i discovered blues, real electric blues, and had no desire to go backwards to pretty basic acoustic guitar music (not just dave either, stuff like early early john mayer and josh kelley and jason mraz).

another reason too is i started to realize who constituted the majority of dmb's fanbase. and i didn't like them. the college freshman. the guy who enjoyed playing acoustic guitar more than electric. guys who's first song they learned on the guitar was "crash into me". this is a really shallow reason not to like a band, i understand. but i couldn't really help it, especially the more i listened to other music and the more people i met that were hardcore dave fans.

and i guess this last semester, the few times i heard dmb, my ears finally went beyond their prejudices and listened to the music again. now i hate it when people, when talking about music, about an artist or whatever, says "i gotta give it to them, they're actually really good." it's such an arrogant thing to say. it means even though they tried as hard as they could to dislike them, in spite of their desire to dislike them, the artist or album or whatever in question was too good. it just seems like a dumb thing to me to say. now, with that said, i gotta give it to dave and his boys. as much as i want to dislike them, based mainly on their fanbase, their earlyish music is really really good.

i haven't started listening to any of their albums yet, but they are now on my itunes and waiting to be played. i probs won't get to them for awhile seeing that i also just added 26 other albums. we'll see. and if anybody has the newest dave with tim reynolds album, live at radio city, please let me know, i would love to get my hands on it.

-jon