Dave Matthews, of All People
I’ve only ever understood about half of what Dave Matthews is saying. Maybe it’s the way his voice leaps up and down the register, or how he speeds up certain verses into a choppy swirl. Not understanding what Dave is talking about hasn’t prevented me from enjoying the Dave Matthews Band since college, when I couldn’t cross the quadrangle junior year without hearing “What Would You Say” blasting from someone’s dorm window.
One of my closest friends at Duke was a redheaded boy from Virginia, same place as Dave, who drove us around Durham in his big, brick-red GMC Jimmy. I think it was a Jimmy, and I think it was the redhead who played Dave a lot, because I cannot hear “Ants Marching” without thinking of them both. Dave was not all I was listening to in the mid-1990s. There was R.E.M. and Dinosaur Jr. and Nanci Griffith and Jimmy Buffet and dozens of others that I can’t remember without a Google search. But it wasn’t Nanci or Michael Stipe who ambushed me last Saturday as I drove to get my hair cut. It was Dave Matthews, of all people.
The night before, my husband and I had watched the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony on Hulu. DMB was honored and played a medley, including “Ants Marching.” The next morning, I slid into my car and pulled up the song on my phone. Halfway to the hair salon, the refrain hit, and it just about broke me. As many hundreds of times that I’ve heard that song over the past 30 years, I have never been entirely sure what Dave was saying, much less what his words might mean. This time, they streamed out of my phone’s tiny speaker as if in three-dimensional boldface, hanging there like something solid in the empty air between my cupholder and the dashboard.
Take these chances
Place them in a box until a quieter time
Lights down you up and die
By the time I parked, my eyes were goopy and red, my face and neck wet with tears. Was it hormones? Stress? Nostalgia? Fear of mortality? Or was it like I texted my friends, after I wiped my face and hustled into the salon: That lately I feel like I’m walking around with my skin peeled back, raw and exposed and more permeable than ever to the world’s ever-growing madness.
One of my friends suggested Lexapro, but I don’t think this new unguardedness is something I want to banish. Maybe I had to live exactly this many years to understand what Dave was getting at — to become porous enough that his refrain could penetrate. It’s a warning, right? The quieter time won’t come, no matter how much we crave it, until the song is over for good. The noise and cruelty, like the music and beauty, are life’s features, not bugs. All you can do, if you’re lucky enough to get them, is take your chances.
