Dave Matthews Finds Grammy Nods Sweet Reward After Tragedy

01/12/10

By NEKESA MUMBI MOODY - The Huffinton Post

NEW YORK — Although the Dave Matthews Band's many achievements include a Grammy Award, getting a trophy has never been the focus of the group, which has blazed an independent path from pop's mainstream.

And it's still not.

But this year, even frontman Dave Matthews is feeling emotional over their two nominations for "Big Whiskey and the Groogrux King," including album of the year, perhaps the Recording Academy's most prestigious award.

"I live in my own tree and I'm pretty out of touch with a lot of what's going on – the mechanics that's going on with the Grammys and the industry in general," said Matthews in a phone interview last month.

"But to get that was a real thrill for me ... because of what the album meant to us and because (of) the loss of LeRoi (Moore) and because of the love that we put into making this."

The Grammy nominations underscore how the band, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, has rejuvenated itself after traumas that have led to the dissolution of other groups: First, creative differences almost tore them apart, then founding member LeRoi Moore died after a 2008 ATV accident.

"This band now as it is, is in a very new and very dynamic, very encouraged phase," said Matthews of the group, which had one of North America's most successful tours last year and is going on a European tour next month. "Overall this last tour was one of the best. The emotional connection and the band and the music that we are making ... is good or as better than we've ever sounded."

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Dave Matthews Interview and Lesson (Acoustic Guitar 2009)

By Dan Apczynski

The stage is set at the 2009 Outside Lands music festival in San Francisco’s sprawling Golden Gate Park, but the namesake and front man of Saturday night’s headliner, the Dave Matthews Band, prefers not to think about it. “I don’t dwell too much on where we are, just try to get it right,” Matthews says. “I’ll think about it afterwards—quickly if it goes well and longer if it doesn’t.” His sincerity makes it almost too easy to accept his humble position, and the win-some/lose-some perspective makes for a fair enough assessment from someone who has had a year like Matthews—his band’s new album, Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, was certified platinum just over 12 months after the passing of dear friend and DMB saxophonist LeRoi Moore (the intended “king” from the album’s title).

The band’s evening set is drawing a throng of devotees who have already begun reserving their spots at the main stage by early afternoon. Backstage, Matthews picks up a beautiful Taylor acoustic (with fretboard inlay of the word “Grux” and a king’s crown illustration from the album’s liner notes) and says, “It’s funny, because I always think, ‘Why does Acoustic Guitar magazine want to talk to me? That guy is a guitar player. I just hold onto it so I have something to do with my hands.’”

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Dave Matthews Remembers LeRoi Moore in Intimate Chat

By Steve Baltin - Spinner.com

The Grammy Museum in L.A. welcomed Dave Matthews and producer Rob Cavallo on Tuesday night to talk about the making of the Dave Matthews Band's recent 'Big Whiskey' record, an album Matthews described as "Being very personal, with a lot of pain and celebration."

The revealing and entertaining hour-plus conversation with Grammy Museum executive director Robert Santelli highlighted both of those aspects, with a heavy emphasis on celebration as Matthews showed off his sense of humor mixed in with the painful talk about fallen bandmate LeRoi Moore, who died in August of 2008 after complications from an ATV accident.

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DMB: A New Beginning, a Return to the Past

By: Mike Bookey - Jambase

It's cutting late into the afternoon in a town just outside of Pittsburgh and, like he's been doing for most of the summer afternoons in his adult life, Stefan Lessard is getting ready to play a show. Well, he actually calls it a "gig," rather than the massive multi-tour-bus-and-semi-truck production that is required for a performance by the Dave Matthews Band. This night at the Post Gazette Pavilion, some 23,000 fans will be adoring every note Lessard pumps out of his bass as he sways rhythmically back and forth, his instrument snug up to his chest... just like he's been doing, again, his entire adult life.

This "adult life" of Lessard's is one of the more intriguing in the annals of rock & roll. A boy, still of high school age, gets snagged up by a promising singer-songwriter to play in a band of equally promising musicians. In only a few years, that band makes it big – really big – and becomes for some concertgoers the only show they care to see for the entire summer.

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GQ.com interview with Dave Matthews

When I told friends and fellow editors here at GQ that I was interviewing Dave Matthews, they chortled and snorted. Two guys broke into damning imitations of Matthews’ raspy singing voice. Another pantomimed Matthews’ bizarre, spastic, onstage version of the Charleston. A friend called the music “soft prog.” One coworker just put his head down on his desk. Okay, dudes! I get it. Dave Matthews is not cool.

But you know who doesn’t care about cool? The 31 million Americans (and counting) who have bought Dave Matthews Band albums. My many friends in high school who got to first, second, and third base for the first time on the lawn of Lakewood Amphitheater in Atlanta while DMB ran down “Tripping Billies” onstage. And people in towns across the U.S. who got hand-me-down Allman Brothers, Genesis, and Steely Dan albums from older brothers instead of records that put you on the shortcut to cool like Fugazi, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols.

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Dave Matthews Band returns and finds its strength within

By Jerry Shriver, USA TODAY

BOSTON — The band leader wanders into a hotel lounge for an afternoon appointment sounding groggy and hoarse, sporting a thick dark stubble, craving coffee and seeming to validate all of those clichés about a musician's life on the road.

But Dave Matthews' condition can't be blamed on cruising the city's underbelly until the wee hours. On the eve of the first of two sold-out shows at Fenway Park last weekend, the famously normal singer/songwriter and father of three was in bed, where he would "roll and read, roll and read," fretting over the reception that awaited the retooled and re-energized Dave Matthews Band and the material from Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King, the group's first studio album in four years, out today.

'BIG WHISKEY': Read the review

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Chicago Tribune: Big Whiskey Album Review

Rating: 3 stars (out of 4)

On the Dave Matthews Band’s latest album, “Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King” (RCA), the band’s late saxophonist LeRoi Moore gets the first word, and the last.

Though Moore died last August at age 46 from injuries suffered in an all-terrain vehicle accident, his shadow hovers over the band’s seventh --- and best --- studio album, most of which was recorded last winter in New Orleans with producer Rob Cavallo, who has previously worked with Green Day and My Chemical Romance.

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Dave Matthews Band Opens Up - CBS News

The Dave Matthews Band has been at the top of the charts with Grammy-winning hits like "So Much To Say," but the group has been press shy ... at least until our Anthony Mason talked with them about their new album, and the tragedy that inspired it:

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It's a strange and improbable fusion of folk, jazz, funk & rock that has made the Dave Matthews Band one of the most popular groups of the past two decades.

"We're still pretty strange in the whole picture," Matthews said. "Not a lot of people sound like us."

But it can be good to be strange. Forty-two-year-old Dave Matthews is frontman, lead singer and songwriter of the group that bears his name, a bar band born in a college town that's become one of the icons of arena rock.

But after 30 million records sold and four number one albums, Matthews admitted to us, the band was in trouble.

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Matthews in top form as season kicks off

By Jeff Miers NEWS POP MUSIC CRITIC

The Dave Matthews Band performed double duty on Wednesday evening before what appeared to be a full house at the Darien Lake Performing Arts Center. Not only did Matthews and his cohorts kick off their 2009 “Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King” tour, but the band did so while simultaneously ringing the bell for the summer concert season in the Buffalo area.

The evening was electric from the get-go. Following an opening set from Robert Randolph and the Family Band — that group plays the

Thursday at the Square series in June — Matthews walked onto the stage just as the lights dimmed, to a mighty roar of applause. Just as he made it to the microphone, a torrential downpour commenced.

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Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King Rolling Stone Review

by David Fricke

Saxophonist LeRoi Moore of the Dave Matthews Band was a famously taciturn man. Moore, who died last August at 46 of complications from injuries suffered in an off-road-vehicle accident on his farm in Virginia, never spoke onstage — not at any DMB show I saw, anyway — and declined to be interviewed for stories about the group. When I wrote about the Dave Matthews Band for a Rolling Stone cover story in 2002, Moore avoided even saying hello. A founding member of one of America's best-selling bands, he was also spectacularly successful at minding his own business.

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