Music Monday for January 6th, 2025

It’s time for the first ever Music Monday: One Random Album, One Short Journey. As it says in the overview, pick one album at random and listen to it front to back, then write a little blurb-y thing about it. Yeah - I’m cheesy. It’s OK.

This week’s album

This week we landed on The Dave Matthews Band - Under the Table and Dreaming. This album made a splash when it came onto the scene a few years ago, and it was quite a trip down memory lane to listen to it again.

• When did you first hear this album? - High school, circa 1995. I’ll leave it to you to do the math about how many years ago that was; I would prefer to not acknowledge it.
• What were you doing when it played the first time? - Well, like most other people, the first thing I heard off this album was the opening snare in Ants Marching - memory is a little fuzzy, but I’m mostly sure that I was in the front seat of a friend’s car driving down the back roads near our school with the windows down and the sun out. There were at least 3 of us in that vehicle, and the day was way more important than the song. But it stands out.
• What emotions or memories are attached to it? Fun and carefree. In retrospect, probably a little too much on the lack of care side.
• What would you write on the card if you gifted this album to a friend? - Great instrumentals, but Dave is harder to understand than Kurt Cobain for most of it.
• Overall take? Man, I’d forgotten just how many callbacks this album is full of. Brooks & Dunn, Doobie Brothers, Blues Traveler, Clapton (you can’t tell me the intro for Pay for What You Get isn’t a direct rip of the acoustic version of Layla). I miss a solid sax combo in pop/rock and we should definitely have more of that.

Join in

Here’s the cheesy marketing hook - do your own and then come talk about it somewhere. It’ll be fun, I promise.