Dave Matthews serves as the featured guest in the new installation of NPR‘s long-running syndicated music show, World Cafe. In the extensive radio package, which clocks in at over an hour in length, Matthews discusses how he’s moved through trying times in various different aspects of his professional and personal life.

As host Talia Schlanger explains in an introduction to the episode,

With its explosive start in 1991, Dave Matthews Band pulled off an incredibly rare rock and roll feat. The band captured an entire generation of young people with songs that featured the unlikely combo saxophone and violin — songs that were more intricate, off-kilter, socially conscious and frankly musical than you usually hear drum up that much mass excitement. …



Dave Matthews Band’s new album is called Come Tomorrow, and Dave is clearly excited about it. He’s also excited about the band’s current lineup. The biggest change right now is that Boyd Tinsley, the band’s original violinist, left in February citing health reasons and later faced sexual harassment allegations, which he’s denied. We talk about Dave’s thoughts on the band without Boyd.

Dave Matthews touches on Boyd’s departure in the interview, carefully choosing his words,

Boyd needed to go and focus on the things that, I guess, he’s focusing on now. It was very hard for him, and it’s been quite a while, to give the focus to this band that I wanted. In this band … I want everything that you have. I want every bit of musicality you have. If you are the most magical improviser, and you have a voice that has never been heard before, I want that, and I want every part of it. That’s what I demand from everybody. …

Boyd has not been able to bring that for a long time … and for that reason, he had to go and take care of himself. Change is never easy, even if it’s for the better.

Later in the interview, Matthews expounds on the underlying catalysts for Dave Matthews Band’s split with Tinsley, and expresses his excitement about the ability and potential of the band’s new-look touring lineup. A Dave explains,

The band right now is like 10 times what I’ve felt for years. I feel the gates open because we have an incredible keyboardist and vocalist named Buddy Strong … It is so invigorating and uplifting at the moment to play with Buddy, and the band, we all feel it. To be on stage right now, I have no idea what to expect from him. It’s so exciting. I can’t imagine what this band is going to sound like in September. I don’t even know if I deserve at age 51 to have this much joy on stage. It’s been decades since this band’s had so much joy.

Keeping with the idea that “change is never easy, even if it’s for the better,” Matthews recounts his experiences living in his native South Africa during the era of apartheid. He explains,

I spent some of my childhood as a white South African. I can never know what it’s like to be an Indian South African or a black South African, or what they would call it, a colored South African, a mixed-race South African. But I know from my view as a person, because of my mother and the way I was raised, I was raised that judging someone for something they were born with is absurd. A system like that can only be justified because somebody wanted more than their share at some point.

And it’s the same history we have [in the United States] in many ways. Our society, our country, was born out of division, born out of wealth created from oppression. We teach in our history classes here that this country was born on an ideal of justice and an ideal of freedom, but that’s gobbledygook.

Matthews renounced his South African citizenship when he moved to the U.S. full-time, but continued to visit throughout the 80’s to visit family and friends. During those visits, he would hear tell of chaotic protests, tense confrontations with authorities, and the struggle his South African peers were experiencing first-hand. As Matthews explains, his connection to those fighting for equality had a powerful effect on his worldview:

[The struggle] was invigorating and terrifying — and beautiful because of the outcome, in hindsight. Even though I was there with friends as part of the population, I still wasn’t a part of the oppressed majority, but I wanted to be part of the struggle of it. That was an amazing part of my life. [It] made me define myself and my position in the world.

A lot of people would say South Africa is not in a perfect situation now, but then I always want to remind people that it’s only a few decades old for a nation. And for a nation to only be a few decades old and to be that far ahead in many ways, that far ahead of this country and how it’s dealing with its race relations, is a lesson to us and almost an admonition of us.

Matthews also discusses the band’s latest release, Come Tomorrow, DMB’s record seventh-straight album to debut at #1 on the Billboard charts. He acknowledges the “racial ideas” that are present on an album in light of the highly problematic and divisive times in which we now live. As Matthews contemplates,

The things that connect us are now, in this strange world, are the radical ideas. And to say we’re all the same, people get deeply upset about that. The lives of people that were not born in America are absolutely, in every way, as important as the lives of people that were born in America. It’s insane to think there’s a good percentage of people in this country that don’t believe that. That is bizarre and terrifying to me that someone might think of a person that’s looking for a better life as a parasite simply because they’re looking for a better life. Or that they’re dangerous, simply because they see God in a different light. That’s the doom of the human race if we separate ourselves out. Until we realize that, if everyone’s not included with the same respect, we’re all doomed.

You can listen to the full Dave Matthews World Cafe episode below:

Dave Matthews – NPR World Cafe – Full Audio

[Audio: NPR]

You can also tune in now to Sirius XM‘s Dave Matthews Band Radio, the limited-run dedicated station playing DMB’s music, interviews with the band, and more in addition to live audio streams of this month’s Friday evening shows. For a full list of Dave Matthews Band’s upcoming tour dates, head here.

[H/T NPR]