Opener “Busted Stuff” has all the serpentine guitars and pinprick rhythms of a Sea & Cake song, the ambling proto-heartbreak of the original now more tense and urgent. He’s made a Dave Matthews tribute album weird enough for the experimental music set but reverent enough for the overprotective DMB fan wondering why this Pig-Pen-looking motherfucker’s got his grubby mitts all over their beloved “Big Eyed Fish.” But no matter how far Walker strays from the source, he’s made every effort to stay true to the guiding ethos of the band that wrote these songs. Some flatter with imitation others rearrange the songs’ DNA entirely. On these 12 interpretations, Walker and company offer a dozen wildly different approaches. On the subject of Dave Matthews, Ryley Walker is as serious as your life. On its face, the idea is a pretty good gag: a prog-folk darling, burning off years of cred by warbling his way through “Grey Street.” But not so fast. Last January, Walker, bassist Andrew Scott Young, and drummer Ryan Jewell-erstwhile Dave fans, all–spent several days holed up in Chicago, working up a tribute to the entire Lillywhite Sessions. But Walker still hears a kind of funhouse-mirror version of all the things he favors in his own music: the instrumental interplay, the tricky dynamics, the self-directed despondence. These finer distinctions matter little in Walker’s generally Dave-agnostic circles, where the Dave Matthews Band aren’t much more than a punchline, an elevator-jazz ensemble fronted by the yowling human embodiment of a Coexist bumper sticker. But he’s certainly aware of the long shadow the work cast over the DMB kingdom: The Lillywhite Sessions is the dark Dave record, the diehards’ favorite. Ryley Walker missed The Lillywhite Sessions the first time around he’s a Stand Up guy. It is a suite of introspection and unease, a ruminative, whiskey-drowned set that found Matthews wading deeper into his obsession with mortality and melancholy. And for many, the unfinished album’s blue moods became the crowning achievement of Matthews as a songwriter. There’s no telling how many people heard the sessions, but between DMB’s fiendishly bootlegging fanbase and the sudden ubiquity of CD burners and file-sharing services, it’s certainly in the millions. Knapp and a buddy put the whole thing on Napster. Still, Knapp had the new-old LP he never thought he’d hear from one of the United States’ biggest bands. The songs were a little rough, having come straight off the mixing board with a wonky left-right balance, scratch lyrics, and spaces begging to be filled. Those songs became Everyday, and the work with Lillywhite was unceremoniously abandoned.īut in March 2001, Craig Knapp, the lead singer of a DMB cover band, found himself with a copy of the scrapped Lillywhite work. The two went on a tear, writing and arranging an album’s worth of material in about 10 days. Weeks stretched into months, and the frazzled band reached a detente: The label would fly Matthews to Los Angeles to meet with Jagged Little Pill producer Glen Ballard in hopes of reseting his system. But the songs were depressed to the point of being maudlin, which made the air in the studio oppressive. In late 1999, Dave and company began working on a follow-up to 1998’s dense, daunting Before These Crowded Streets with longtime producer Steve Lillywhite. DMB’s The Lillywhite Sessions are almost certainly the most widely heard full-length bootleg of this century.
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