Dave Matthews

of humor about everything, including himself. We talked about why it took six years between albums, why it took a year off from the road with the Dave Matthews Band, the secret connection between his band and Black Sabbath, then what it was like to turn fifty and keep on going. The Dave Matthews Band played their very first shows in Charlottesville, Virginia, had a benefit for Middle Eastern children, and also at

an Earth Day fest of all. Matthews was born in South Africa and grew up in America and England, but he was back in South Africa for high school and after graduating in ninety five, five years before the apartheid regime began to crumble, he moved to Charlottesville rather than serve in the Military. He was tending bar there at a place called Miller's, and he had to be coaxed

by friends in performing his own work in public. But once the Dave Matthews Band came together, things happened fairly quickly. The band released its first album, Remember Two Things, mostly live collection, in two years. After those first gigs, they built a passionately devoted audience, in part by using the model of the Grateful Dead, meaning they encouraged the crowd to tape and trade live shows. Two years after that debut album, they opened three shows for The Dead on

that band's final tour. In the next year, they were open shows for Bob Dylan in the year after that, The Rolling Stones. Of course, they were growing their own audience that whole time, and by they were headlining stadiums. That's the year their third studio album, Before These Crowded Streets, debuted at number one, starting a streak that's continued across seven albums right up to the recently released Come Tomorrow.

First Dave Matthews Band album in six years. Though they were almost always described as a jam band and still are, the Dave Matthews Band became one of America's biggest rock bands in the nineties, a position they've never really given up.

They wrapped a bunch of different audiences into one thing, sort of the same way they wrapped a bunch of different music, the jazzy saxophone of Leroy Moore, the blue, grassy violin of Boyd Tinsley, the solid funk bottom of drummer Carter Beauford and bassist Stefan Lazard into one thing.

It's easy to understand the significance that Dave Matthews Band took on for the Grateful Dad's audience after the death of Jerry garcia In, but what's less obvious is the role they played for nineties rock kids around the same time, since n was also the year that Pearl Jams stopped playing the United States for three years while they waged

a battle with Ticketmaster. In the post grunge moment, music that sounded both happy and sad, that mixed the intimate with the epic was a style looking for a hero. Some bands could latch onto it for a few minutes the way that remember Them Marcy Playground or The Spin Doctors did, and some could manage it for a few albums. The White Stone Temple Pilots did, But aside from Dave Grohl, I'm hard pressed to think of anyone who's managed to make it last for a career that spanned decades the

way Matthews has. Dave Matthews had experienced loss early on. His father died from cancer when he was just ten years old, and songs like Satellite or Lie in Our Graves talked about the fragility of life. Look so did Tripping Billy's in its own way. Other songs like Crash Into Me were about chasing down pleasure. A big audience trying to figure out how to make sense of bad times and make the good times last found something in

the Dave Matthews Band look. It didn't always translate from performance into the recording studio, and that may be the one thing that Dave Matthews Band truly shares with the Grateful Dead, but the live show became a defining experience, documented on more than forty live albums. The Dave Matthews Band audience is loyal for them. Eadie is not summer without sitting on the lawn at a Dave Matthews amphitheater

show in North America. They were the biggest grossing band of the two thousands, selling more than I've entred and twenty million dollars of tickets, and that slowed down only slightly. According to Billboard. In the band played fifty shows, selling seven tickets and earning forty two million dollars. But last year a couple of unusual things happened to the Dave

Matthews Band. The first is that they took the summer off, and I think that might be the first summer in twenty five years without Dave Matthews Band shows as Matthews. It's plained to me turning fifty had something to do with it, my fiftieth roth. They did fall right around the same time as the Seven Deadly Sins or the Cardinal Sins took over the highest office in the nature of your birthdays in January. So you're saying it was

around the time of the Trump inauguration exactly. You turn fifty, you have this moment of what thinking, Do I keep doing this? Do I change what I'm doing? Like what's going on? I think there was a lot of different thoughts. I think for me, I've never been ungrateful. I don't think I may have been tired. I've never been ungrateful for what I've managed with the band and what all the guys in the band have taught me. But I do think when I turned fifty, I was like, but

I really have to have a selfish year. So in Matthews took time for himself with his family and thought hard about the future of his band. While he was thinking about the future, a reconsideration of the past was underway, thanks in part to Greta Gerwig's use of Crash into Me in her coming of age movie Ladybird. The song turns up twice, first when Ladybird, played by Sir Sha Ronan, plays it over and over again with her best friend while she's trying her way out of high school heartbreak.

And then later she's riding in a car with her new boyfriend who's one of the cool kids, and Crash into Me comes on the radio while he's talking trash about not going to Brahm. I fucking hate this song. I love it. I actually want to go to prom. Here's a lot going on here. A young woman is standing up for herself, not letting other people define her. But also it's someone in high school saying fuck it. To being too cool to admit that she loves the

music that she actually loves. It's a poignant moment in the movie. I'd say what She asked if she could use the song. I was like, yeah, I didn't, really, I didn't. You didn't see the script. I didn't. I could have, but she's a talented actress and it was a few years ago, and I was like at the beginning, but she asked because I think for her it was a point it song for the you know, I'm grateful. But then when I watched, I was like, what, that's a super generous place to put it. And it also

shows sort of exactly what I was saying. But it was a beautiful place that she put it. So I had to center a note and say thank you so much. Well, nice of you. What happens in the movie is a little like what happened to Black Sabbath or Kiss in the eighties and nineties. Those bands were pretty much hated by rock critics in their day, but they became celebrated when kids who had grown up loving their music began to make records or write rock criticism of their own.

Looking back now, you can see how Sabbath's gloom and emotional chaos told a certain kind of truth for seventies kids let down by the implosion of the sixties, and just maybe the Dave Matthews Band represented something of a flip side, a sort of hope for its audience. An interracial band led by a guitarist who had grown up in South Africa, the Dave Matthews Band came to prominence around the time Bill Clinton was elected. They were about the world as you wanted to see it, rather than

the world as it was. And if that sounds like an exaggeration, you haven't talked politics with Dave Matthews. A committed progressive, I think the best political position for me is as far left as you can go before you start going towards somebody else's right. So I think we make the mistake here often of saying, you know you have the right and you have the left. We barely

scrape the left in this country. But if you can go further left and then stop, which would be the real center, before you appear to be going towards somebody else's right, that's a good left because then everybody on the left then But then the truth is that We really would be best off if we were all in our communal left rather than everybody's absurd radical right. The radical right is the problem. I don't know if about

the radical left. I think they're all just reasonable. Come Tomorrow has some songs that date back more than a decade to two thousand and six. Matthews worked with four producers and pulled out tracks from sessions that have been left on the shelf. That sounds like it could be a mess, but it isn't. It's a more focused album than he's made in a long while, with a bigger, heavier rock sound. Compare the version of Can't Stop from Live Tracks Volume six, recorded twelve years ago with the

studio version from Come Tomorrow. That's the sound I heard when I went to see the band on the road this summer. A slightly different band, as Matthews told me in this interview, there were some long simmering tensions with violinist Boyd Tinsley, tensions that made him think hard about the future of the band. Tensely announced in February he was taking a break to focus on his health and family.

In May, around the time the tour started, sexual harassment charges surface against Boyd, which he has denied, but the Dave Matthews Band management has released a statement saying he's no longer a member of the group. On this summer's tour, Matthew was touring with a strong seven piece band that includes Rashaun Ross on trumpet, Jeff Coffin on saxophone, and Buddy Strong on keyboards. Matthew says he's never felt better about the music he's playing. Mind you, he said stuff

like this before, but look at it this way. Come Tomorrow is an album about family, about love, and about the future. It starts with a song about giving birth, So think of this as a rebirth moment for the Dave Matthews Band. When he says he's never felt better about the music he's playing, about the work he's doing, he's saying it after a lot of time and reflection. Here's what else he had to say, Speed get the kind of major in years. Welcome to my guest, Dave Matthews.

Thank you very much, very nice to be here. So I saw you play in Hartford on Saturday night. I just want to ask, when you're doing a sixteen minute version of Crush, do you know at the start it's gonna be sixteen minutes or do you get five minutes in and like, let's go along on this one? Boy? I think it was. I mean, that's one of the songs that we have grown accustomed to expanding. But there are times when we get out of hand. But I

don't mean that in a bad way. That one. I do remember thinking, wow, this one keeps going and it really and the way I think about it is is not that we've left a song a long time ago and now everything that's happening since then we're in a completely different place. But it's nice to have a launching pad.

Or sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes you come in from some sort of improvisation and then land in this song, which is another way to do it, and occasionally, which I suppose would seem like a more obvious way to do it, in the middle of a song, will go off on some tangent and then hopefully find our way back to it. But there's a variation. I don't know that we know exactly how long. There have been times.

I think it was with a Bella Fleck and the Flectones, we did a version of a song H forty one with them that lasted close to three quarters of an hour. You're in some major league dark star territory there. But I think it's fair to say that by the time that song ended, there's no way anyone would have known what the hell of the song was. If they came in the middle of that, they would have been like,

what is happening? But that really wasn't the effect. When I saw you guys on Saturday, like, I knew where the songs were, and the band sounds very, very tight right now. God, it's so much fun right now. It feels like every moment there's such a connection inside the seven of us. There's just this sort of don't jump off the train because it's going fast kind of feeling right now that there's moments where it locks in so tight that you really just have to do your part.

You have to have faith in in what you're doing, because if you lose faith, that's the only thing that could stop. We're in such a mean groove that I don't remember feeling this kind of power. You've always been a band with great flexibility, but there did seem to be like a new kind of power to things, especially

the new material, which seems more rock band focused. And that's interesting that you say, because you know, we've been working on a lot of that stuff for you know, some of the tunes actually more than twelve years old. The new songs, some of them have a real muscily groove driven thing to them. It kind of has an effect of doing that to the rest of the repertoire. I think from the beginning we've been open to improvisation,

to let any things go. But everything changes. I've been struggling a bit with the band, with the sound of the band or where we've been going, and I think, you know, that's what led to Boyd stepping away. I think that bringing in Buddy Strong. It was realizing now just this ingredient of energy and of focus that is changed. It's like finding the last part of some Not to say there wasn't a magic I'm not saying that, but I'm saying there's this new ingredient that changed the recipe.

Everything tastes a little different, Everything changes, and everyone changes. It's like we're all looking at each other like in a whole different way. Dave Matthews Pan took last summer off, took a summer vacation. This is that you mentioned Boyd stepping away. This is the first tour without boy Was there any apprehension, Well, I think you're part like, yeah,

there's been apprehensive for a long time. I you know, for me, well, there's been I feel, and I think the guys all, I know, the guys agree that Boyd certainly was a big part of the early part of the band and just remained because he's been there from the beginning. It's powerful personality. But it's been a while that I think all of us have felt that his focus.

I mean, he was there on stage, but you know, in rehearsals or in the studio, his focus was really, it felt like to us, not in the room, and so he was his own whirling dervish or his own storm. But that really worked beautifully sometimes. Other times it was very disoriented or seemed disconnected, and it was a frustration, and we came There was a lot of confrontation, but I'm a fiercely loyal person, and it took a long time for me to say, look, we need more from you,

we need more focus on us. It just felt like it's been a while that in that time when we were meant to be focusing on what we're doing. I've been having a really frustrating time getting to feel like he was putting in anything more than the bare minimum, and to get him to cop to that. That frustration, in combination with his own personal things, led him, you know two follow my advice and go to look after himself. The result of that for me is that we suddenly

have this We're not having to pull anyone along. Suddenly everybody's like at the front line, you know, pushing to get ahead. You know, we don't know where we're going into. You know, we got Buddy Strong just outrage. I think he's dragging us all along, but we're all dragged. Everyone's pulling forward. It's like Strong, newest addition to the family. And we met years ago, but we started talking about working with Rashan actually called me up and say, man,

there's this guy. Body's wrong. I listened to some of his gospel work online and I had known he worked with a lot of different people. This band is an interesting band, and we want not only you to play the notes, but we also want you to play your notes. What do you got? And he has got a lot with him. It's it's like this open it's opened all these doors to our own music and to each other.

They're playing the carters killing me. He really is. And he keeps saying, and he keeps saying looking at buddy, and he's being like, man, you know what, that's what it is. You know, he was a joyful presence, good lord. Every time I turn around and see him, it's like

the presence. You can hear that it one was present, but you can see it in his eyes and you can see everyone else because we're all looking at each other, like everybody's looking at each other as if quite a lot of the time, if it's not over joy or getting lost its with this sort of like this shoot is bad. What is happening. It's like getting something that you deserve, but you sort of can't believe that you're

getting it. I gotta say. When things started, I was like, she's I don't know, I don't know, I do I want another trumpet solo. And then like twenty minutes in, I was like, there better be a fucking trumpets solo coming. Yeah, he's Rashan is blowing, Like I see him over there. It looks like, you know, he's gonna come out of the front of his horn if you know, it's like, I'm like, what is happening everybody? Jeff? Actually all it

looked as though Jeff up in Hartford. There was one point that I thought he was gonna this is the last show that we played. I thought he's gonna go to his knees. At one point he was bad. He was used blow and I was like, look at this fool, He's about to go down and it would have been appropriate. He didn't. He didn't, but it was close. I was so tired by the end of the show that I almost couldn't physically play the last song in the set, but I was so happy about it, like my hands

and my body and my voice. I was so out of breath. I felt as though like I might not be able to make it, but it was such a joyful feeling. I don't know, I don't know. Over it's not joy. It's not like happy happy, smile smile. It's some mean groove that is going on up there. So let's talk about the new record. Come Tomorrow. Ninth studio album, seventh consecutive number one album debut on the Billboard Album Charts. If you're keeping score at home Mark, this one is

number one whatever statistician came up with that. I feel like someone's been fixing the books. But I like to think that looks good. You know, it looks good. Band putting out seven consecutive albums that enter the charts at number one is a record that a new record up for records, Yes, new record for records. You mentioned some of these songs date back to two thousand and six. There are four different producers, three studios. There was a one session that was started for an album and scrapped.

This doesn't sound like it's gonna be a successful record, and yet it's a really good fucking record. This is a focused album. I think it's interesting, and I'm glad that you feel like that, because I feel like almost more about this album than I've felt it about any of them. But I think it was you know, I made We've recorded some of the recordings that date back a while. I mean, I love those records, but I

had sort of said, well, that's not finished. I don't have a place for that yet because we didn't finish that project. Then we did grow Roux and we finished that record and I love that record. And then I did some more recording, you know, so we did grow Roux with Cavallo, and then I did more recording with Alasia, who I always right with John Alasiah, who was one of the producer, always right with him. The record that we had sort of show before that we were doing

with Bats and and then I made another album. I went back. We did an album with Lily White that I'm happy with. Some of the the songs. I don't think in the end, I don't think it was the best of the album could have been, but I still there's some good things in there. And then I went in the studio again with Rob Cavallo and we had the beginnings of it. Worked for a while on an album and we had more than the beginnings of a great

record there. But again, for whatever reason, I think disappointed my own stop my own head getting you know, a lot of things on my mind about the band. My I desperately wanted to make a not feel disappointed in some ways, like a little bit the way I felt about Away from the World. Although again I don't want to a baby out all these albums or good children, none of them are. We're not gonna but but you have said that Away from the World you feel you

went back to almost overwork. Yeah, I feel like that, and I feel like it lost some of the teeth. Then I went back in the studio and I was working with John Alasia and uh Rob Evans, two of the other producers. We just started listening to some of the songs. I was really just saying, you know, that is as good as anything I've ever done. That's just

how I started thinking of everything. At the same time, I'm also writing more music, and what they were all also telling me was like, the stuff that we were doing right now was as good as anything that we have in the back. So we've got this super creative process going. It was like a monument. That's not the right word. It was almost like something to hang The

whole process on. Was really when I went back and listened to the track Can't Stop, which has Leroy More on it, and it was sort of a live performance, and bats And was in the room, and this is one of the two tracks that go all the way back to two thousand and six. Yeah, Elaysia and Rob Evans went in and took the track which was recorded with bats And, and they mixed it and then they said, this is what we came up with, And I sat

and I was like, this is a monster. And the way they had Rob Evans like he likes to get to Carter's drums like right out, you know, and so it's a beast. So then everything the way that I was thinking about it was everything has to be as strong as that. You haven't made an album in six years. But it's almost like this is the greatest hits of the last twelve years or something. It feels like that in a weird way. It feels like this is the

best stuff I've done. And I think grew Rux was the most focused album because in the middle of it we lost Leroy. So it had this real purpose that was behind it too, which was to pay homage, your homage depending on how you want to be to le Roy. And so even from the cover, everything about it was Roy, and I think that's what sort of gave me and Carter and everybody the motivation to get that record right.

And Rob Cavalla who had met and Doug who met Roy, and we'd all lost him, so that sort of focus was like we had to finish this, We're gonna have to make it great for Roy. In this instance, I do feel like I someone said you need to step back, you need to look at what you've made and not discount the heart that you put into some things. And so I started digging through and there's a lot of

music I couldn't get on the album. I want to ask you this is this is a very focused record in a different kind of way for you, in that I don't think there's been a record that is quite this inward looking from you before. A lot of songs about love, a lot of songs they seem to be about marriage, or they're about lasting relationships. I'm often used to your songs addressing the outside world a little bit more, whereas this felt like a very personal, my family kind

of record. I think maybe there's sort of allowing myself a little bit of that was feeling comfortable to talk about it. Maybe that says something about where I am with my family and also where I am with the band. Maybe it's turning fifty whatever or past that, whatever it is. I do feel like a lot of this is looking inward. And even that song Black and Bluebird is a little bit of a part of conversations that I have with

my son and with like daughters. It sort of is like the words the things I've learned to think about in some ways, or wanted them to think about. When we're having conversations either about the world, about selfishness, or about what's happening or the wonder, you know, always try and remember that the universe is much bigger than we are. And just that kind of idea from my kids is I want them to feel stunning lee small, and therefore inspired, as opposed to I can't stand my old phone. I

need a new phone. Oh my god, it's the worst, you know. I mean, that's fine to have some emotions like that, but I'm grateful that my kids aren't overly obsessed by that kind of stuff. I think that song is a wordy way of saying that we are so tiny in the universe that if all of us and everything on the planet vanished tomorrow, nothing, not even the moon,

would notice our absence. That's really interesting because particularly at this moment in time, and this is a difficult period in American history, let's put it mildly, Yeah, in the world. I mean, you watch everywhere these waves of self absorbed self righteousness and sort of ignorant and arrogance, scary combinations of personality and also to connect what's happening in America to world politics waves of nationalism, which which are a

very different kind of thing here in this country. I think nationalism yet that very often allows the most disturbing things to happen in cultures. When a culture starts to think that it has somehow reached further or is the example of excellence or should be acknowledged as the most excellent. When that happens, very dangerous, dangerous things happened. I think nationalism is what allows a Partei. Nationalism is what allows Hitler. Not it's all fine to be you know, I'm American.

I'm proud to be an American. That's fine, But you have to be able to say that feeling and that belief is no more reasonable or more true than if a Canadian says I'm a Canadian and I'm proud to be a Canadian and I'm great. It's no more true. Well, I also grew up being taught that saying I'm proud to be an American meant that you were setting an example that you wanted to share with the world, and not I'm proud to be an American. Stay out, keep to yourself. That is will be on our side of

the world, you be on your side. But it is a scary time. And I do think that the sort of sense of entitlement or the idea of being if you're born in America for whatever reason, that for no reason other than that you are worth more than someone who is born in Panama. That to me is an obscene concept that the value of a human being could in any way come from where they're born or who

helped them. And you did mention apartheid earlier when we were talking, and of course that is the idea of something you grew up with and a system that said you you can be born here in South Africa and still be worth less. And that my concern in this country is that nationalism, that we have to keep out all these people because this is ours, because we were born here or we arrived here, right. That is truly strange coming from a country that's so young and is

so recently created by immigrants. This country is half the soldiers that fought on the side of the Union and a civil war word immigrants. So it was a civil war sorts, but it was fought by people that were coming here that we're from somewhere else. We always have to acknowledge that, because if we don't, then I feel

less America. Was like, Oh, because I wasn't born here, I'm less American by some people's standards than someone who was born here, which doesn't fit in my opinion the America that I think, in my ideal view of it, it could be to look at the state of the population of this country and all our differences, and to acknowledge some things but not acknowledge others talk about America as if it's this land of justice and freedom, and then not acknowledge that it's a land of immigrants, and

not acknowledge that much of it was built by the hands of slaves, and that certainly it couldn't be what it is now had it not been for the hundreds and hundreds of years of enslaved people doing a lot of the work. The album is named Come Tomorrow. The title track is about this change we want to see, right, it would be great. There was talk at first when

I had an album together. There's some murmurings. People are saying we should put Come Tomorrow out as a single, and I just said, even though it was written before the most recent park Lands horrifying shooting. I wrote it and we recorded it before that. But that said, regardless of the timing of it, would make it seem pretty on the button, and I felt like that also would be I felt like it might be perceived a sort of stepping in to something that really isn't my place.

I'd rather be supportive of the efforts to get some sort of sane situation with guns and automatic weapons in this country, rather than I would try and jump in the middle of somebody else's terrible situation pretend I'm part

of it. That song is, at the same time as it's in some ways for me, quite cynical, it is also you know, when I talked to my children about how they see the world, I mean, their view is so much more open and tolerant, even though I feel like I grew up a very tolerant person, and the seventies was, as far as the authorities were concerned, the

late seventies was a very tolerant time. It was like, suddenly, we're all like laughing at the stupidity of our Your girls are teenagers, yeah, and and and if you have a teenager now, then you are likely involved in a conversation about gender and fluidity. That is not the one that you and I grew up with. No, it was almost unthinkable, exactly. But my kids they're also connected to

each other now as well through technology. Not always great, but I think a lot of times it is actually not a bad thing because they're always in touch with each other a lot of time. Maybe it's not the deepest of conversations, but sometimes it is deep conversation. I learn to be more tolerant and watch myself around from them more than they they learned from me. I'm glad

maybe I made them lean towards a kindness. But you know, sometimes I'm a found mouth pig and sometimes I'll say something in the car and you can't say that, Dad. I say, actually, I can say it, and I will say it in the safety of my family, knowing that you better know that if I say some crazy shit, that you know where my heart is because you sit around in my house and smell my hearts. You know.

Not only that. So I was talking last week with someone you've worked with for a long time who was full of praise for the way you keep it normal. She was like, you know, here's a guy who drives his kids to school every morning, doesn't make a big deal about where he lives. It's not super secret. Dave Matthews lives in seatt All, and it drives a priest. I try not to stick out. I'll try to make my strange stay on the inside as much as possible.

I do think it's better for my kids. I do feel like if I walk through an airport by myself, there's a much better chance that no one is gonna notice me. Then if I walk through the airport with a posse, if I really don't want anyone to see me, well then I just won't go outside. And and and I do think I don't want people knocking on my door and saying I made you this jam, or whyon't you come to my wedding. I don't want strangers coming

out of my house. But I feel like if you're sort of accessible, it makes the curiosity as to what's they're less it's less interesting. You can treat yourself like a normal person. People will treat you like a normal person. We mentioned that you took a a summer vacation last summer. Did turning fifty have anything to do with not going out for a summer tour for the first time in a long while. I still worked. I did go on tour with Tim Reynolds. It's light, it's easy, you know,

it's just two guitarsome. Turning fifty also my view of things changed a little bit then too, because how well I was not totally unexpected, but it was my fiftieth birthday did fall right around the same time as the Seven Deadly Sins or the Cardinal Sins took over the highest office in the nature. Your birthdays in January, so you're saying it was around the time of the Trump inauguration exactly, you turned fifty. You have this moment of what thinking, do I keep doing this? Do I change

what I'm doing? Like what's going on? I think there was a lot of different thoughts. I think for me, I've never been ungrateful for what I've managed with the band and what all the guys in the band have taught me. But I do think when I turned fifty, I was like, but I really have to have a selfish year. You know, it's all relative, not regardless of everybody else, but just because of me. And so I told my kids, said, what do you want to do with what kind of party. My wife had what kind

of party want? I don't want a party. Had to give me a surprise party. But I do want to go have a trip, and I haven't figured out yet, but I want to take you all on a trip, and I want to go somewhere where, and then I want to take all our cell phones away and take all our things, and I want to hide everything, and I want to do something where. We ended up going to Kenya to reteddy this incredible elephants sanctuary. I had some other places and had I think all my family

would agree. You know, I'm not saying that everybody can hop in and plan and go to the middle of Kenya where there's nothing, but it was everything that I could be. And although I felt selfish um in some ways, if I looked at it, it was just unbelievable time for me and my family to indulge each other and to uh enjoy each other, the company and too. It was really nice. It was also beautiful because it wasn't a battle, even in the remotest way. Please canna have

my iPad? Oh can I just check my bad It was like there was none of it. It was crazy, but it was because we were around all. I think it's easier to be without your iPad when there are elephants, that they make it easier to to forego social media is wild. That alone is a good argument for an outride. Band of ivory in this country will help you stay in the room, as will rhinoceros is. Although they are not as smart as elephants, not an elephant is hauntingly

smart animal. If I was gonna tell anyone to read a very simple, very quick read about elephants, that's a beautiful book that anyone would enjoy by Lawrence Anthony called The Elephant Whisper, and it's just his experience with a herd of wild elephant. It is mind boggling the respect you will gain from a very unassuming book. But it will make you wonder at the universe. See turn fifty. You took your family to Kenya? But did you have that moment? I always think of that, Neil Young song,

I am the ocean. Yeah. People my age don't do the things I do. It's funny because I do. Sometimes hear my own voice saying There's no way I'm gonna be doing this when I'm forty. I mean, I can hear my I know my own voice, and it was going, well, there's no way I'm gonna do this when I'm forty.

Now I feel like I was wrong, and there aren't a lot of people who get to keep doing this, Like it is a crazy thing, and unless you're working as a musician and you've had to work all long to be lucky enough to get where we are and keep being able to do it at that really very lucky. I don't take it for granted. For the most part, everyone's in a while, I take it for granted. I do feel like I don't care as much about what people think as I did twenty years ago. I I

think I deeply cared. Now I'm kind of like, if you don't think that what I did was good, I don't care. I'm not saying you're wrong, although I think you're wrong. I I'm just saying that I don't care because it's good. It's funny too. It's a different thing when like the people who grew up on your music start telling their stories or they start writing their rock history because they don't do it. It's the same thing. I was thinking about this the other day. Black Sabbath,

we think of black Sabbath is fucking Sabbath. But in the seventies, if you're reading rock criticism, it's like they're no good and they're not really Satanists. That's not real and it's not good. It's not good music, and it's fundamental to us. Yeah, I just I just know that it's at the core of me. You know. I do remember being almost frozen with joy fear when I was in the gym here in the city and Ozzie was

on a treadmill near me. Now he was running, but he was the whole he was shaking, the whole ban He runs like Frankenstein, which is not surprising, but he's like, I mean, his feet are hitting the ground. Use I was like, how do his bones hold up? He was running and it was not long, it was maybe a decade ago. I was impressed that he was running, but I was also just like you know, and eventually got the courage to go, you know. But I didn't bug

him too much. And he's, of course, as we all know now having watched Our Charming, he wasn't, as you know, the first and only show of its sort that was actually worth something. But in my strange opinion, you mean the only reality show, the only family reality show. Great, why do it again? That one was perfect? Just watch reruns. It was perfect and he could see he was a loving, amazing person. But what great music to hate? You know, you might hate to admit it, but it's great. It's

in my bones. We're now at a stage where the Stones are on tour and they're in their seventies. You can probably do that too. I'll let that happen when it does well. The way I feel right now is that I cannot believe how knew this, how good I feel about this record. Like I think that if someone listens to this album and says I don't get it, they should either listen again or I don't know, go eat a cupcakes. It's they're loss to me. It's such a good record. I feel so good about it. And

you're back out on tour this summer. I cannot remember feeling this elated about playing music with anybody and feeling so lifted by the experience as I do with you know, the same people and some new people then I've ever felt in my life. And it's just what the hell did I do? Right? But I just feel like when I look at Carter, and I know that we were in his basement practicing, and I know Stefan was a

fifteen year old kid when I first approached him. When I look at them now and I see those same people and you don't really see how much you hate you know, that makes me think, well, we did something right. Even though we've lost some friends along the way, we did something. We found something in each other that is remarkable, and I don't take it for granted. Day We're gonna leave it there. Thank you so much right on, and it was really nice talking to ye. This was fantastic.

Thank you did make you. Inside the Studio is an I Heeart Radio original podcast created by Chris Peterson. This episode was written and hosted by me Joe Levy. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallens for audiation, and our mixer is Matt Noble. Would like to give a big thank you to Dave Matthews and our CIA Records. Follow Inside the Studio on iHeart Radio or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.