Twenty-Five Years Spent "Before These Crowded Streets"

I was not the most clued-in of teenagers, but even I knew "Crash Into Me" was a creepy song when it came out, and it was quite bizarre to see it climb up the charts. It was even weirder to see a certain segment of the population singing along on the radio to a song with that particular angle to it, even weirder than I could be. Maybe it wasn't a surprise that while I enjoyed the song for what it was, as I did "Ants Marching" and "What Would You Say" from the first record, I was by no means a devoted Dave Matthews fan when the hype for their third record started out.

Looking back, "Before These Crowded Streets" is another one of those records that makes no sense as a personal classic. It takes twists and turns into areas I was not a fan of at the time (and still might not be, honestly), and it doesn't have the immediacy of their previous singles, but yet there was something about this oddball record that caught my attention in a way the first two didn't.

"Don't Drink The Water" was a bizarre song to release as a single. The slow-burning swampy vibe contrasted with everything that was on the radio, and the song doesn't really have anything you could call a chorus. It was very much the kind of song that you would say was written for the already converted fans at the live shows, except it doesn't even have the best basis for long jamming. If we go back to the origins of the term, where an album was a collection of whatever songs an artist had recorded in the last bit of time, "Before These Crowded Streets" is indeed an album.

What convinced me to give Dave Matthews more of my time was "Crush", another song whose appeal at the time I would not be able to explain. The key to the song is the jazzy vibe, but to this day I still don't like jazz at all. So why does "Crush" work for me in spite of that? I don't know, honestly. Maybe it was the short violin solo that first caught my ear, or maybe it was that the opening bass riff was simple enough for me to figure out when I was first picking up a guitar. Maybe I heard something in the lyric that glued itself to something in my subconscious, as the topic of dreams has been a recurring motif in my own work over all these years.

I remember how annoyed I was when I saw the lyrics to "Halloween" weren't included in the booklet. The string arrangement on that song was so beautiful, and Dave's throat-shredding vocal so viceral, I was mesmerized by that song. To have that be the one left for me to decipher on my own was frustrating, but frustration was a part of the record experience. I was also frustrated when the songs would drag on for an extra minute at the end, or when the little studio chatter was thrown in between songs, or when the record was sequenced with the back half staying soft and slow throughout.

Frustration can do one of two things; it can push you away, or you can push through it. Being that this was 1998, and I didn't have many other records to listen to, I pushed through. I found the details in the songs I could love, and slowly found my frustrations with the rest slipping away each time the record spun, as if the gravity of my emotion was no longer enough to keep the rotation from flinging it off into space.

As I listened more, and as time went on, those softer songs opened up to reveal beautiful fragments of melody. It would only make sense later, when the realization hit that Dave Matthews is a very somber songwriter. The band's later records are littered with slower ballads and soft crooning, letting the energy of their live shows be something completely separate. Those elements were always there, but this record is where it became clear the band was something different on record.

Also, "Before These Crowded Streets" makes much more sense in light of "The Lillywhite Sessions". The sadness of Dave's writing, and the oppressive atmosphere the band could create to remove any glint of sunlight, would be taken to extremes on that unreleased record. It started here, though. They were records emerging from the same soil, digging up the same demons we try to keep buried. I wouldn't have known at the time how much that record would mean to me, but now that I can look at these things in retrospect, "Before These Crowded Streets" is not as much of an outlier as it first seemed.

Twenty-five years later, when I put this record on, I hear every moment of that history. I still hear my frustration, I still hear my moments of clarity, and I can now hear the genesis of what would come next. Hindsight may be twenty-twenty, but foresight is mysterious. This is a case where my naive self knew something I wouldn't comprehend for many years. That's a rather magical experience to have with a record.