275. Song Nos. 4,116-4,119: “Grey Street”
Dave Matthews: Some Devil, 2003; Dave Matthews Band: Busted Stuff, 2002; The Central Park Concert, 2003; The Lillywhite Sessions, 2001

Oh, look at how she listens
She says nothing of what she thinks
She just goes stumbling through her memories
Staring out onto Grey Street
She thinks, “Hey, how did I come to this?
I dream myself a thousand times around the world
But I can’t get out of this place”…

The consequence of gravitating to similarly self-described music snobs as a younger, angrier person who was just starting to figure out my tastes in everything from the music I consume to the company I keep was that High School Me got so. much. shit for being a DMB fan. And it was someone who’d become my best friend for a while who introduced me to this band in the earliest days of high school while also offering me my very first experience with the joy of loving some silly little piece of music equally as much as the person you’re sharing it with; to have something at the core of that bond with one person get so thoroughly maligned by so many other people I considered friends (or was dating) should have been a great first yardstick measuring the longevity of someone’s companionship.

It’s still an applicable litmus test, too. That close friend is still a significance presence in my life, despite a few years of distance where we but especially I did some soul-searching and personal growth, and despite how wildly incongruous my husband’s and my Spotify libraries are and his penchant for ribbing me about a fondness for The Decemberists that he will never understand, he’s the first significant other I could take to a Dave Matthews concert without fear of subjecting myself to hours of musical ridicule. I guess it’s fitting that one of the first bands I truly loved has always been a terrific indicator of who’s worth keeping around, even if that’s a slow-coming realization.

I don’t listen to DMB nearly as much as I used to, but a fondness that lovingly and authentically nurtured doesn’t ever really go away, and that goes doubly for the tunes I’d declared my favorites over the years in a list that seemed to grow with every newly released live or studio album, whether it was catchy fresh material or longtime concert standards reshaping themselves to try on some previously unexplored nuance of feeling that recast all previous recordings in a whole new fondness. And, sure, I absolutely love having four different versions of one song tucked into my arsenal of emotional-support music and practically charting its evolution with every new performance, but there’s something extra rewarding about unintentionally cultivating a collection of the same track reinterpreted over and over again for both the studio and stage when you truly love that one piece of music getting a little more instrumentally flamboyant with each iteration.

Ranging in length from 4:46 minutes to almost six, this quartet of a single song owes its existence to the storied Lillywhite Sessions, an ultimately scrapped recording session that would’ve been the band’s fourth consecutive record with producer Steve Lillywhite had RCA not aborted the mission for reasons I’ve either completely forgotten or never actually knew. More than 20 years later, I’ve lost a lot of the details and time has dulled the sharper edges of a fan denied, but neither the sting of disappointment nor the need to hear those chucked tracks take too much effort to excavate.

By the time I got to college, my fondness for Dave Matthews and his band had receded quite a bit after being handily eclipsed by an emo phase that rose up to meet some indie-rock snobbery I leaned into a little too hard, but I also met people who simply loved music and were an early lesson in how maybe one’s musical tastes shouldn’t be the most interesting and well-tended-to part of their personality. Those early friendships started pushing at the edges of my admittedly limiting opinion regarding what jewel cases were worth displaying as combination conversation pieces, bragging rights and the kind of trophies broadcasting your dedication to having the most obscure tastes in the room, and those broadened horizons began with one of them sharing their long-leaked version of those elusive recordings with me.

By then, that aborted album had found new life as Busted Stuff and concert tunes, so I’d had plenty of time to fall in love with “Grey Street.” It didn’t even matter that it rode in one one catchy-as-hell tune: What got me was the lyrics, which would have been right at home sung by any of the stiflingly-genre-loyal bands I’d glommed onto toward the end of high school and through my first couple of college semesters.

..She feels like kicking out all the windows
And setting fire to this life
She could change everything about her
Using colors bold and bright…

Dave Matthews’ lone solo album Some Devil dropped just weeks into fall semester sophomore year, when my indie elitism was steadily growing in both confidence and intensity almost directly in proportion to every new guilty pleasure I allowed myself. I don’t know when I wound up adding it to my musical collection, but I know it sounds like winter break and bundled-up car rides and frozen noses in direct opposition to his band’s characteristic summertime feel. And that cold-weather association extended to the bonus live tracks tacked onto my version, which included a live, stripped down version of this song that already hit a little too close to home but seemed poignantly honed when it was recast as an understated acoustic recording.

There are some songs that you love for a little while but no less ferociously before they fade in the rearview; there are songs that might ebb and flow and come and go, but that adaptability and reliability mean that they grow and move and become one with you. And while maybe owning the lyrics to “Grey Street” in new ways with every chapter it plays the soundtrack to isn’t exactly something to aspire to, loving a song across the decades does spark a retrospective joy all its own. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with being able to be brutally honest with yourself, and there’s nowhere to go but through when you hit a wall and nothing but an optimistic plan to get you to the other side of it.

…Take what you can from your dreams
Make them as real as anything
It’d take the work out of the courage…