 
|
|
|
Page 1
|
|
|
Love and death: "They're good themes. What else is there?" ...
|
|
|
Page 2
|
|
|
Matthews cuts through the filler by digging up graves ...
|
|
|
Photo Gallery
|
|
|
Dave Matthews Band live in New York's Central Park, 09.24.2003
|
|
|
|
|
|
Browse Bands by Name
|
|
Or enter a band name below to search:
|
 Bands Main
|
|
|
|
|
|
On "Gravedigger," Matthews cuts through some of that filler, rattling off tombstone 411 ("Cyrus Jones, 1810 to 1913") but also giving the dead epitaphs that really sum up their lives: "Cyrus Jones ... made his great-grandchildren believe/ You could live to a hundred and three/ A hundred and three is forever when you're just a little kid/ So Cyrus Jones lived forever."
Their lives — their deaths — are treated gingerly in the song, but then laid bare in the video. Yes, besides being a great-grandfather, Cyrus Jones was also a slave, and yes, you see his lashing at his master's hands. The fresh scars are hard to ignore, as are the tears of Murial Stonewall, who "lost both of her babies in the second great war."
"I don't think that the song is particularly grim. I don't think it's a bleak song," Matthews insists. "I think it's somewhat more of a reflection, maybe a request not to forget things very quickly. It's about remembering, even if it's about imagined memories, like looking at someone's grave: 'That person might have been a slave,' 'That person could have been,' 'Her children could have been killed in World War II.' "
"So Damn Lucky," the car-crash song, shares the common theme of recollection, but on a more personal scale, since it's about someone's life flashing before his eyes. "The violence is interesting because you're so aware of it," he says. "It's quiet, often calm, you know, and things take a long time to get done. And the character is going through things in his mind that happened recently, so it's more about not wasting time and paying attention to things."
Why the urgent need to remind people to remember? Why the graphic history lesson about racism and war inherent in the video's brutal imagery? Because, he says, it's timelier than we would like to think.
"If we forget all that stuff and just think about the latest fashion, latest movie, latest music, the horrible things in our past can come back, because we forget things very quickly in such a high-speed society, and that's dangerous, because the horrors, the horrors can raise their heads in a society of indifference. It might be happening right now. It's easy to distract people from what's important if they're already distracted. It's easy to slip things underneath them."
As much as Matthews might criticize our government and society, he uses the same tactic — but when he's trying to distract the listener, it's so he can insert another layer of meaning. Taking a tip from Nelly, who scored a hit using children's rhymes, Matthews employs a familiar, almost comforting tune, "Ring Around the Rosie," to lend a lighter touch to the bridge of "Gravedigger." But that "we all fall down" song isn't so innocent — many believe the lyrics signify disease and death.
Besides children's rhymes, Matthews also takes liberties with Christian mythologies, using devils and angels as figures of speech or even as characters or alter egos.
"The fairytales, they're all pretty similar," he says, "the Books of Abraham, the books by the children of Abraham — the Muslims, the Jews, the Christians — who can never get along, probably because we're all siblings.
"Theoretically, we're from the same father. Not that one," he says, looking upward, "but Abraham. According to my Bible, Abraham is Pappy."
And according to Matthews' Bible, he's not just some devil, but the devil. In a twist on a biblical story about testing one's faith by rejecting material needs, in "Save Me" Matthews tries to tempt Jesus (referred to as "Mr. Walking Man"), who's trying to stick it to the devil by fasting 40 days and nights in the wilderness.
But in Matthews' version, the devil quickly tires of the quest and puts in a bid for his own redemption so he can get back "home." After all the reflection upon the evil in the world, why should we have sympathy for the devil?
"The devil got the short end of the stick at the beginning of time," Matthews reasons. "The devil got sent to an eternity in hell, and to run the world below and the dark nether regions of the dirty underbelly of existence, without a chance for redemption. That's kinda tough. Shame.
"Poor devil."
|
|
|
|
Photo: RCA
|
|
|
|
|
