The band’s sound had already been changing and deepening. On its 1990s albums, Matthews’s guitar — often acoustic — was the band’s only chordal instrument, joined in light-fingered counterpoint by saxophone, violin, bass and drums for staccato grooves that blended folk, funk and jazz. Through the years, as its audiences grew to arena size, the band was bolstered with keyboards, electric guitar and horns, growing brawnier, weightier and brassier. (Rashawn Ross, a trumpeter who has toured with the band since 2006, now has a more prominent role.) But the band’s founding rhythm section — Carter Beauford on drums and Stefan Lessard on bass — still keeps the songs nimble, no matter how burdened Matthews’s thoughts can become.
“I’m down in this hole again,” he sings in “Looking for a Vein,” as he compares himself to a miner who works compulsively. “What if I strike it/rich as I want to be?” he muses over a loping, six-beat guitar lick. “Will it set me free/Or be just another hole to dig?” In “The Only Thing,” over a barreling electric guitar riff that hints at Led Zeppelin, Matthews is desperate to “Crawl out of this skin I’m living in/Crawl out of my mind into the outside.” And in “Monsters,” a reverberating ballad with a sputtering double time undercurrent, he’s trying to reassure a child — or possibly himself — that the “monsters in your head” aren’t real.
In these new songs, love, or even the possibility of love, solves a lot of problems: the fear in “Monsters,” the self-loathing in “The Only Thing.” Other songs — “After Everything” and “Break Free” — cautiously celebrate love going right, emotionally and carnally, with Matthews pledging devotion while full-tilt horn sections blare his delight.
But he’s well aware that love, in a happy domestic sphere, is just an individual refuge, not a global solution. “The world is going in all directions/Like bottles shattered on the floor,” he sings in the elegiac “All You Ever Wanted Was Tomorrow.” And he closes the album alone on acoustic guitar, with “Singing From the Windows.” The song imagines being within a siege, thinking about “when the war is over” while watching fires and hearing sirens.
