Too Much

The most disciplined song on Crash is the one about gluttony.

That claim will get pushback from anyone who filed Dave Matthews Band under jam-band sprawl and moved on. Fair — so earn it. “Too Much” runs four minutes and twenty-one seconds, short by this band’s standards. It doesn’t sprawl. It doesn’t solo into the middle distance and find itself somewhere unexpected. A song about too much, refusing to be too much — and from a band that could have gone anywhere it wanted, that discipline was a statement.

Listen to what the restraint is holding back. Stefan Lessard’s bass opens the song — he was seventeen when Crash was recorded, seventeen, playing with a pocket and a thickness that players twice his age were still chasing — and the song locks into its groove without waiting for you to catch up. Boyd Tinsley’s violin comes in over the top, and it belongs there; people resist that about this band, and then the song plays, and the resistance doesn’t survive contact. Carter Beauford is on drums, doing what he always did, which is make you wonder how anyone else agreed to play drums in the same era. LeRoi Moore’s saxophone arrives messy in the best way — the way a sax sounds when the player is following the song instead of a chart.

“Gluttony, a word — and to the me, me, me.”

The subject is consumption. The way Americans in particular had learned, by the mid-nineties, to want more of everything. To treat wanting as a virtue. To lap it all up, feel vaguely sick, and lap up more. Matthews sings it with a kind of cheerful horror, and that is the honest register for it — the horror because he means it, the cheer because he knows we’re all doing it. Him included. He wrote this while his band was becoming enormous and he could see it happening from the inside: a song about excess, by a man becoming the product of the very excess he was describing, going straight onto the record the machine was about to sell. He wasn’t pointing at anyone. He was reporting.

Now the part the pushback gets wrong. The band got filed under college parking lots and Nalgene bottles and guys in backwards hats, and the filing stuck harder than the listening did. But Crash, out in the spring of 1996, went to places nobody had predicted for a band that built its following the old way — van tours, college radio, the kind of relentless live presence that sells tickets not on the strength of a hit but on what happens when the songs get long and the band stops following the map. Steve Lillywhite produced it, and he had been in the room for early U2 and for Peter Gabriel, a long list of records that trusted musicians who knew what they were doing. He knew what this band was. He didn’t sand it down. Because what the band was, underneath the reputation, was strange: Matthews came out of the Charlottesville scene carrying influences from South Africa, where he grew up, an open-tuned guitar approach that doesn’t sound like anything else on rock radio in 1996 because it isn’t like anything else on rock radio in 1996. The musicianship was borderline absurd the whole time. You just have to listen past what you’ve been told.

The singles from Crash sometimes softened. “Crash Into Me” gave the radio what it wanted — slow burn, ache, the long exhale. “Too Much” doesn’t soften. It is about being stuffed to the point of numbness and still opening your mouth.

“Honey, I eat too much.”

A confession and a shrug in the same breath, and twenty-nine years on the line lands harder than it did in 1996, because the acceleration the song described was still mid-acceleration when he wrote it. The consumption has not slowed; we’ve only gotten more efficient at it. And the song still refuses the appetite it describes: it grooves, says what it came to say, and gets out.