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Tour Prep and Playlist: Freshen Up 2022
Posted by Joe M in Tour News at 9:30am on Friday, Apr 29th, 2022
Let's start with the playlist, maybe for lack of naming creativity: Freshen Up 2022. A collection of 30 songs from the past year featuring the new songs, and lesser played songs or ones that took on changes, geared to prepare beyond the 'staple' songs.
To kick it off the 6 new songs, in order of most recent, starting with brand new this year Something To Tell My Baby, and the late last year (and very well received) Madman's Eyes. And from there, the playlist includes songs that made returns in 2020 or played selectively, and also the songs that took on changes (which we highlight in the playlist below.)
How to listen: Stream straight from the DMB Hub app! Stickied to the top of the feed. If you don't have the app yet, grab it, if not for this, for some of the other tour prep items below.
- 01. Something To Tell My Baby (DM w/strings 4-17-22)
- 02. Madman's Eyes (DMB 11-5-21 Columbus)
- 03. Walk Around the Moon (DMB 7-30-21 WPB)
- 04. The Only Thing (DMB 8-27-22 Pittsburgh)
- 05. The Ocean and the Butterfly (DMB 8-6-21 Chicago)
- 06. Singing from the Windows (DM 8-13-21 Deercreek)
- 07. Grey Street (DMB 7-23-21 Raleigh) (Return of the 3rd verse!)
- 08. Sweet (DMB 9-10-21 Irvine) (Return, but also with new Tim & Buddy Outro)
- 09. Trouble (D&T 2-19-22 Mexico)
- 10. Warehouse (DMB 8-13-21 Deercreek) (Return of the stop time / 'woo!' intro)
- 11. Dive In (DMB 11-5-21 Columbus)
- 12. When I'm Weary (D&T+Buddy 2-20-22 Mexico) (First time D&T&B, strong version)
- 13. Big Eyed Fish (DMB 8-27-21 Pittsburgh)
- 14. Broken Things (DMB 11-5-21 Columbus)
- 15. Death on the High Seas (D&T 2-19-22 Mexico)
- 16. Seek Up (DMB 9-10-21 Irvine) (New intro progression)
- 17. Rye Whiskey (DMB 9-17-21 SPAC)
- 18. Dodo (D&T 2-19-22 Mexico)
- 19. What You Are (DMB 9-17-21 SPAC)
- 20. Hello Again (DMB 7-23-21 Raleigh)
- 21. Good Good Time (D&T 2-18-22 Mexico)
- 22. Everyday (DMB 8-20-21 Mansfield) (Everyday 2.0, credit Buddy)
- 23. Sweet Up and Down (DMB 8-20-21 Mansfield)
- 24. Too High (D&T 2-18-22 Mexico)
- 25. Stay or Leave (DMB 8-6-21 Chicago)
- 26. Write a Song (DMB 8-13-21 Deercreek)
- 27. Up and Away (D&T 2-18-22 Mexico)
- 28. Black and Blue Bird (D&T 2-20-22 Mexico)
- 29. Recently (DMB 7-30-21 WPB)
- 30. Bismarck (D&T 2-19-22 Mexico)
There's so much on the table for this year. For one, "new album" rumblings have continued (are we on to year 3 now? ha.) There are promising updates from time to time. Biggest of which is a "new mix" of Madman's Eyes that was shared amongst the band inner circle at the end of March. Both a confirmation of active mixing happening, and Madman's Eyes is shortlisted.
Since this time last year, we did get 4 new original songs. But we know from past leaks that there are others out there, including song with working titles of Monster, Stay Hungry, and Heart. And partial working names that include Young, Uke (presumably as in ukulele), and 70's Song.
As tour kicks off, make sure you have the DMB Hub app ready to go if you're interested in live show updates and/or push notifications. If you're not familiar, when enabled you can be alerted what the band is playing as they play it. You can also stream show recordings (thank you tapers!) to stay current with band performances and new songs.
But also, do you know which shows you're attending? Then you should "Add" them to your personal tour stats ("I'm Attending"), either via the DMB Hub app or Tour Central webpage. Doing so will automatically track and update your personal DMB stats, but also a couple other reasons.
Additionally, when you add your shows you earn and collect DMB Hub Stubs, which based on your DMB statistics you are awarded Stubs as a form of "achievement unlocked." And this is no longer DMB Hub only! Now on the website, in addition to offering your personal Tour Stats at the top-right of every page, you can also now view your Stubs via browser too.
The Setlist Game will be back once again this year for the summer. Bragging rights on the line. If you haven't played, join in on the fun and try to predict what the setlist will be for upcoming show(s). Earn points for correct or close guesses and take the trophy, either on a single show or the whole tour. You can make picks either via the Ants website, or right in the DMB Hub app, no matter where you are.
Wondering what special treats you may be in store at the show, in particular liberations? In the last year there were 9 liberations. Are there bound to be the same amount, more, or less? Check out the songs up for DMB liberation, including Alligator Pie, Cry Freedom, Black and Blue Bird, Bismark (of last three that were recently played D&T in Mexico.) Or *cough* Shotgun?
And probably one of the most powerful features on the site, take advantage of tour central advanced search. The Ants DMB Tour Central Search Engine allows you to search for a single song, or multiple. You can stipulate that any song is an opener, a set closer, in the encore, or the encore closer. Or, you can string multiple songs together and turn up shows where those tunes were played in order. All of these options can be filtered by further metrics, such as guest, venue, artist and show date range. On top of that, you can also have it only display shows that are streamable on DMB Hub app, or available to download on Ants. You can even check the box to only search against shows you've seen, so you can create a lot of personal queries. And when you've built your favorite searches, you can save them to your Tour Stats, so they're always accessible (and sharable!).
Even if you don't have an iOS device, follow (with notifications) @dmblive for live show song updates, and @SetlistGame for game fun. And don't forget to subscribe to the AntsPodcast. Lastly, enjoy some debate or banter over in the Ants DMB forums. Looking to meet some new DMB friends at your next show, or want insight/tips about a venue? Head over to the Tour Forum and the associated venue thread to chat with others attending.
Happy tour time everyone!
Watch: Dave performs Something to Tell My Baby with strings
Posted by Joe M in TV Appearances at 11:42am on Sunday, Apr 17th, 2022
Seeing that an actual string accompaniment has been written/composed for the song (as minor as it is), we’d say the song is more than a live tune. Of note, the “live” video was recorded from the Village Studios in Los Angeles, CA, the home studio of John Alagia, long time DMB inner circle (producer, composer, lyricist, recording engineer, friend) and in own right successful career. Surly you don’t show up in an LA studio with strings and only record a single song for a TV appearance. :-p
Watch the video here via CNN.
Ants Podcast 107: The Show Must Go On
Posted by Matt Yette in Podcasts at 9:40am on Saturday, Sep 4th, 2021
While Apple's built in Podcast app is a great app for listening to the Ants Podcast, an alternative that some might enjoy has emerged: Overcast. Overcast is a great, free podcast app that has gained a lot of popularity since its release. If you're looking for another app for your Ants Podcast fix, give it a try!
We are also now on Spotify! Check us out!
Special Photo Gallery - DMB Northerly 2021
Posted by Joe M in Tour News at 6:13pm on Tuesday, Aug 17th, 2021For many it has been way too long since there were Dave Matthews Band shows. Some have been lucky enough to see one of the first 11 shows. Some have no choice but to be more patient and wait a bit longer. You may have forgotten what it's like to be at a DMB show, or even what the members look like, ha. (How's that Carter COVID beard looking?) Ants has you covered in pretty much every other aspect, we figure might as well cover you from that perspective too.
So we enlisted the help of long time Ants member Boywonder44 to help us capture some of the energy from this band returning to touring in a special photo gallery. (In a more professional settings Boywonder44 likes to be referred to as Brett Bergen. [We don’t get why either.]) He recently attended the Northerly Island (Chicago) weekend, joined our Ants tailgate (Thanks to everyone that came out!), brought his camera, and we’re lucky enough that he’s sharing some of his shots from the concert with the community. (If you want to check out his other live concert photography, you can see them here. He's previously shot TR3, Umphreys McGee, 311, STS9 and a slew of others (ie, DMB, ha.))
Click on the Dave image to the left to go through the gallery of ~60 great photos.
(To view from DMB Hub App, click on the Dave thumbnail after you click here .)
Thanks to Brett for sharing! Let the reminiscing begin. And for those still waiting to attend upcoming show, may the countdown go a bit speeder for you!
Tour Central Liberations
Posted by Matt Yette in Site News at 8:43am on Monday, Aug 9th, 2021
Allowing the term some creative license for a play on the literal definition, in this context "liberation" is meant to indicate that a song has been "set free" of "oppression;" aka "It's been a long time since this song was played." The power of our Tour Central database has allowed us to dig deep and offer up dynamic insight on this phenomenon. Thanks to Tour Central, we're able to show not only every liberation ever achieved, but also what each tour's historical liberation list looked like, and what songs were liberated during that run of shows in a "point in time" style. And we've taken it even further: we treat liberations relative to their performer, so you can track Dave & Tim, or Dave solo as separate liberation lists. We've even integrated liberations with your My Tour Stats page, so you can view all the liberations you've ever witnessed (even ones you might have not been aware of!), and others can also view your list. Even the DMB Hub Stubs have gotten into the act, awarding you stubs based on not only how many liberations you've seen, but if you've seen some variant of an "uber" liberation.
With that in mind, what constitutes a liberation? Admitting that it's a very subjective measurement, a line needs to be drawn somewhere, and we've drawn that line at 150 shows. While we go into the criteria more deeply on the Liberations area of the site, 150 shows represents somewhere around three full years of concerts in the band's modern era, and that feels right to us when determining how long a song should go before being considered "liberated." It's also what drives our "liberation factor." 300+ shows are considered a 2x liberation, while something that hasn't been played in 1200 shows would be an 8x! While we also track number of days since a song's last performance, that metric isn't deterministic in our system. The band's brief 2017 hiatus, and last year's cancelled tour come to mind as two recent examples that push us to value shows over days. We're sure this will continue to be the subject of debate, and that's cool with us. We aren't saying it's the only way to view things, just that it's our way of looking at it for the sake of the feature on Ants!
You'll find liberations front and center on our updated Tour page in Tour Central, and from there you can head over to the Liberation area, where you can break down the data by artist and sort by all manner of metrics to view the data how you prefer. We hope you enjoy the additional insight into just what makes a Dave Matthews Band (or Dave & Tim, or Dave solo) show so special, as well as our recent addition of DMB Hub Stubs and Tour Central Advanced Search, and thank you for your continued support of Ants!
DMB Hub Stubs on Ants
Posted by Matt Yette in Site News at 7:36am on Thursday, Aug 5th, 2021
DMB Hub Stubs are now integrated into the antsmarching.org website, so anyone with an Ants account can earn, view and share their stubs! Every Ants member already has a link to their Tour Stats at the top-right of every page on the site. Once there, you'll now find a new section on the left hand column for your DMB Hub Stubs. Clicking the Stubs icon will bring you to a page dedicated to displaying your Stubs "trophy case," and there's also a link to generate the same Stubs Passport that you can share from the app, but now you can do so right from Ants!
We're excited to expand this feature from DMB Hub to the site as a whole. With a new DMB tour comes renewed energy, and we hope you all enjoy the new features that we continue to add to antsmarching.org. In that vein, we wanted to give a special shoutout to our Ants+ members, without which we couldn't continue to operate. Your support is greatly appreciated! As Ants approaches its 20 year anniversary, we strive to continually create innovative features, providing Dave Matthews Band fans with the best experience next to actually being at a show!
If you have an iPhone and aren't familiar with DMB Hub, give it a download! It's completely free, ad- and tracker-free, and plugs you into the latest DMB shows via our Live Setlist push notifications. And as we mentioned, there are hundreds of live recordings available to stream, in no small part due to our amazing taper community!
Tour Central Advanced Search Now Available
Posted by Matt Yette in Site News at 8:41am on Tuesday, Aug 3rd, 2021
Sure, Tour Central has always had "search" since its inception. Technically. But for once, technically correct is not the best kind of correct. It was a very basic version that let you search show data fields as if they were text. Sometimes it would work; often times it didn't offer the flexibility to be any sort of useful. It had been on our list, literally, for years (decades?), and we actually managed to put it together in the summer of 2019, but then life happened, and it got put on the back burner.
Ants Tour Central has always been the foundation of the site, with an advanced database that was built from the start to be a powerful and flexible means of storing data about the band's performances. It's been tweaked and extended over the years, but at its core, was intelligently designed to scale as it has over the better part of two decades. The power and flexibility of Tour Central has enabled us to bring this advanced search engine to the site!
The Tour Central Search Engine allows you to search for a single song, or multiple. You can stipulate that any song is an opener, a set closer, in the encore, or the encore closer. Or, you can string multiple songs together and turn up shows where those tunes were played in order. All of these options can be filtered by further metrics, such as guest, venue, artist and show date range. On top of that, you can also have it only display shows that are streamable on DMB Hub, or available to download on Ants. You can even check the box to only search against shows you've seen, so you can create a lot of personal queries. And when you've built your favorite searches, you can save them to your Tour Stats, so they're always accessible (and sharable!).
With a new tour comes renewed energy, and Ants is getting a ton of work poured into it, in various areas (more to come on that!). Stay tuned to Ants for the latest as we roll out more features, and we hope you're enjoying the tour so far!
Ants Podcast 106: Back in the Game
Posted by Matt Yette in Podcasts at 1:11pm on Sunday, Aug 1st, 2021While Apple's built in Podcast app is a great app for listening to the Ants Podcast, an alternative that some might enjoy has emerged: Overcast. Overcast is a great, free podcast app that has gained a lot of popularity since its release. If you're looking for another app for your Ants Podcast fix, give it a try!
We are also now on Spotify! Check us out!
DMB Catch-Up: New Album, New Songs, New Tour
Posted by Joe M in Album News at 8:55am on Saturday, Jul 17th, 2021
First, let’s put this year in some context. Has the debate been settled if we increment our age during COVID lockdown year or not? Well with DMB and in the spirit of ‘no asterisks’ we do, and 2021 marks the band’s 30th anniversary! The anniversary itself fell on March 14th, the date of DMB’s first show 30 years ago. While there wasn’t much fanfare on the actual date, this year is set up to be a milestone year beyond just the number. Already with exciting highlights to look forward to this year, but hopefully there’s even more untapped we don’t yet know about. (Especially if compared to the commemoration of the bands 25th anniversary with a special vinyl box and hometown Charlottesville show.) But enough daydreaming, let’s recap what we know at this point.
We chunk this out into 3 topics: New Songs, New Album, and New Tour.
First up: New Songs
DMB Catch-Up: New Songs (part 1)
Posted by Joe M in Album News at 8:55am on Saturday, Jul 17th, 2021
Since the last concert you’ve attended there are two new songs that have debuted, both Dave solo (for now?) Those include Singing from the Windows and The Ocean and the Butterfly.
Singing From the Windows, a finger-picked acoustic (capo’ed 6 string) song, debuted on 3/26/20 for the Verizon Pay It Forward Live (the first one). A song inspired by the videos that went viral of Italy residents singing outside their windows together during quarantine.
Watch/Listen to Singing From the Windows
And the other, The Ocean and the Butterfly, a strummed acoustic (6 string) song, debuted on 10/18/20 for a webcast fundraiser for Save Our Stages (an organization seeking to give aid to independent music venues.) The performance occurred at The Jefferson Theater in the downtown walking mall of Charlottesville, a venue DMB performed at back in 1993, and a frequent spot of after party/concert performances when the band plays hometown John Paul Johns Arena, often with DMB connections or DMB visitors.
Watch/Listen to The Ocean and the Butterfly
(We’ll hold off on describing anymore of the song so that you can form your personal opinion. Feel free to join the discussion on the forums of your thoughts.)
[cue infomercial voice] But that’s not it, there’s more! [end infomercial voice]
There are some more songs we know are being worked on but we haven’t heard them yet. How many more we don’t know. Dave says a couple more than you can count on two hands, but we also have indication that it’s as high as 26 ideas/songs (but that number may include not just new songs, but existing songs to work on in the studio. More on that in a bit.) Dave says some songs are raucous rocking, some songs are really sweet, and some songs are "retro music" that he's excited about.
One of those is Walk Around the Moon, and we may have a new album thanks to it (full updates on album in part 2). The hype on this song is about as high as you can get, a dangerous and possibly unfortunate tag because of the extra inspection it will derive as a result. But Dave says (at least in the moment) that Walk Around The Moon is one of the best songs he’s written. (wowzers, ha) The birth of the song starts out in The Haunted Hollow Studios (DMB’s own studio built in the woods of Virginia) where Dave worked with Rob Evans (longtime DMB inner circle in lots of roles, but primary lead Recording Engineer) The song initially developed over just 2 hours of work and instantly stuck out to Rob. Rob had constantly been working to convince Dave to start having Carter get involved in the different ideas they were working on, but it was Walk Around the Moon that finally convinced Dave to bring Carter into the studio (and start a writing/recording session together.) Dave says the song is about taking a walk in the woods, and some connection to mushrooms that isn’t clear at this point.
The only other item to add about the new songs is some of the instruments played on them. It appears Dave has dove deeper into the ukulele. Dave recently had two new ukuleles produced to take on tour and has been pictured playing one while rehearsing with the band. So unless Sweet is about to get a very heavy tour rotation (ha), it seems like a new song(s) with ukulele is(are) very likely. Also, some of the new songs have been noted to have Carter on an electric drum set, but is this just for ease of recording ideas early in the process (vs multi-mic recording a drum set), or is this an instrument that actually makes it to the final versions? (It would be interesting if/how electric drumming would translate in some form/fashion to the live show if used in new music.) A couple Moog synthesizers of Buddy's were pictured, and effects pedals for Rashawn’s horns. And lastly, Stefan has commented that he played standup bass on a couple songs, and he’s been pictured playing an acoustic bass in tour rehearsals, something new outside of the acoustic set days.
(Continue reading on about New Album.)
(This article is one part of a 3-part series on New Songs, New Album, New Tour. See them all here.)
