Dave Matthews, the songwriter whose fans had to vote twice to get him into the Rock Hall

Dave Matthews

Photo: slgckgc / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 9, 1967 Johannesburg, South Africa
Occupation	Singer-songwriter
Known for	Just Go with It, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, You Don't Mess with the Zohan
Awards	2 Grammy · Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

For three decades Dave Matthews has been the most popular musician much of the rock press would rather not discuss. His band has sold more than 25 million concert tickets, debuted seven studio albums in a row at the top of the Billboard 200 and turned an amphitheater on a cliff above the Columbia River into an end-of-summer pilgrimage. When fans put Dave Matthews Band first in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s public ballot, the Hall left it out anyway. His reply has never changed: a Dave Matthews song is finished only when the band plays it to a crowd, and never the same way twice.

The restlessness started early. Matthews arrived in Johannesburg on January 9, 1967, the son of a physicist whose job at IBM moved the family to Yorktown Heights, New York, when the boy was two. His father died of lung cancer in 1977, when Dave was ten, and the family went back to South Africa. He finished school there in 1985, in the last years of apartheid, and as a Quaker pacifist he left the country rather than serve in its army.

The detour ended in Charlottesville, Virginia, where his mother had settled. Matthews tended bar at Miller’s, met the guitarist Tim Reynolds through the local scene and started writing songs of his own. A lawyer named Ross Hoffman pushed him to record a demo and take it to two of the town’s best jazz players, the drummer Carter Beauford and the saxophonist LeRoi Moore. Matthews later said he went to Beauford not because he needed a drummer but because he was “the baddest thing I’d ever seen.” With the bassist Stefan Lessard, the group played its first documented show in March 1991 at a club called Trax, a benefit for a children’s charity. The violinist Boyd Tinsley joined full-time the following year, and the sound locked into place: an acoustic guitar played almost like a drum, over a rhythm section that came out of jazz rather than rock.

The band grew the slow way, on the road and through fan-taped concerts. Remember Two Things, released on the band’s own Bama Rags label in 1993, led to a deal with RCA. Under the Table and Dreaming, produced by Steve Lillywhite, went six times platinum on the strength of What Would You Say and Ants Marching. Crash followed with Crash Into Me, the song that became his signature, and So Much to Say, which won the band its first Grammy. Before These Crowded Streets, the darkest of the early records, debuted at number one in 1998.

That success came with a reputation he has never fully shaken. To much of the rock press, the band was the soundtrack of college parties, all long jams and earnest strumming. The real fracture, though, came from his own fans. Sessions with Lillywhite for a fifth album stalled under the weight of Matthews’s bleakest songs, and the band shelved them to make Everyday with Glen Ballard, the producer of Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill: a bright, electric pop-rock record that sold enormously. Weeks after it came out, the abandoned recordings leaked through Napster as The Lillywhite Sessions, and a large part of the audience decided the discarded album was the better one. Busted Stuff, in 2002, re-recorded most of those songs, an unusual concession to listeners who had already heard the draft. Two years later the band’s worst headline had nothing to do with music: in August 2004 the driver of one of its tour buses emptied the septic tank through a grate on Chicago’s Kinzie Street Bridge, onto an open-top sightseeing boat passing underneath. The driver pleaded guilty, and the band paid $200,000 to settle a civil lawsuit.

Away from the band, Matthews kept a second career as a duo with Reynolds, two acoustic guitars captured on Live at Luther College and Live at Radio City. His only solo studio album, Some Devil, brought a Grammy for Gravedigger, a song that reads names and years off headstones. He has also acted, most memorably as a piano-playing savant in an episode of House.

Then came the losses. In the summer of 2008 Moore was injured in an all-terrain-vehicle accident and died that August of complications. The band named the record it was making after him: Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King debuted at number one and earned an Album of the Year nomination. A decade later the band lost another founder in harsher circumstances. Tinsley was removed in 2018 after a trumpeter from his side project sued him for sexual harassment, an allegation he denied. Come Tomorrow, released weeks later, became the band’s seventh consecutive studio album to open at number one.

The Hall of Fame saga follows the same split between fans and gatekeepers. Nominated for the first time in 2020, the band won the public vote and was still passed over, something no fan-vote winner had suffered before. Four years later its fans won again, with more than 586,000 votes, and this time the Hall agreed. Julia Roberts, who had appeared in the band’s Dreamgirl video, inducted the group in Cleveland in October 2024, with Tinsley and the late Moore honored alongside the current lineup.

The studio has mattered less since. Walk Around the Moon, in 2023, debuted at number five, the first album by the band since Crash not to open at the top. The stage is where Matthews now puts the weight. This year’s release, Take Me Back: Live at the Gorge, captures the band’s August 2025 concert at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington, where it played Before These Crowded Streets in full for the first time, with Béla Fleck sitting in. The 2026 summer tour opened in May in The Woodlands, Texas, with songs the band had left in the drawer for years, and closed with the customary three nights at the Gorge over Labor Day weekend. On October 3 Matthews played Tom Morello’s Power to the People Festival in Columbia, Maryland, and joined Bruce Springsteen and Dave Grohl for the all-star finale.

He lives in Seattle with his wife, Ashley Harper, whom he married in 2000, and their three children. He has owned Blenheim Vineyards near Charlottesville since the same year and has sat on the Farm Aid board alongside Willie Nelson and Neil Young since 2001. The band’s Bama Works Fund has given more than $65 million to causes around Charlottesville.

Next comes an arena run that starts on November 4 in Madison, Wisconsin, and ends with two nights at Madison Square Garden on November 12 and 13. No new studio album has been announced. Judging by the year he has had, Matthews no longer treats that as a gap in the schedule.

Tags: singers, rock, Dave Matthews, Before These Crowded Streets, Crash Into Me, Dave Matthews Band