Walk Around the Moon is the tenth studio album by Dave Matthews Band, released on May 19, 2023. The album is their first since 2018’s Come Tomorrow, their first without founding member Boyd Tinsley, and is the first with member Buddy Strong. It was preceded by the lead single “Madman’s Eyes”.
The most famous lyric in “Crash Into Me,” Dave Matthews Band’s breakout love song from 1996, was a mistake. After recording several takes, Matthews added a throwaway line as a joke: “Hike up your skirt a little more and show your world to me.” It made the final cut, of course, and the song would forever be read as a tale of lust rather than desire. “It’s the song of a 26-year-old or 25-year-old,” he recently told GQ. “Now I’m a 56-year-old, and that changes what you want to sing about.” These days, Matthews is more concerned with impermanence as liberation and themes that distill the long-running mindfulness of his music. On Walk Around the Moon, the band’s 10th studio album, he turns those subjects into surprisingly pretty odes, tapping into his gentler side with the wisdom and grace afforded by age.
According to the New York Times,
In these new songs, love, or even the possibility of love, solves a lot of problems: the fear in “Monsters,” the self-loathing in “The Only Thing.” Other songs “After Everything” and “Break Free” cautiously celebrate love going right, emotionally and carnally, with Matthews pledging devotion while full-tilt horn sections blare his delight.
But he’s well aware that love, in a happy domestic sphere, is just an individual refuge, not a global solution. “The world is going in all directions/Like bottles shattered on the floor,” he sings in the elegiac “All You Ever Wanted Was Tomorrow.” And he closes the album alone on acoustic guitar, with “Singing From the Windows.” The song imagines being within a siege, thinking about “when the war is over” while watching fires and hearing sirens.
