Dave Matthews Covers DiFranco

Dave Matthews has recorded a cover of Ani DiFranco's "Joyful Girl" with New York-based jazz/funk/hip-hop fusionists Soulive. Matthews sings and plays guitar on track, which is targeted for the group's forthcoming album, Next. Matthews, who invited Soulive to open a string of Dave Matthews Band gigs this past spring, went into a Los Angeles studio on Monday with the group. Glen Ballard, who did DMB's Everyday, produced the track.

Soulive's guest-laden follow-up to this year's Doin' Something, Next, is due March 12, 2002. The album also features the group's collaborations with Black Thought of the Roots ("Clap!") and former Grove Theory singer/occasional Roots contributor Amel Larrieux ("I Don't Know"), and a reworked version of Doin' Something's "Bridge to 'Bama" by producer/DJ Hi-Tek and rapper Talib Kweli. The new "Bridge to 'Bama" is currently available for download at www.soulive.com.

Meanwhile, the Dave Matthews Band will head into a San Francisco studio next month without Ballard to record its fifth studio album. For the first time in the band's storied major-label career, DMB will self-produce, with the aid of longtime engineer Stephen Harris. The as-yet-untitled new album will mix a handful of recently penned material with tracks originally written for "The Summer So Far"/"Lillywhite Sessions," an aborted but widely bootlegged album tracked in 2000 with producer Steve Lillywhite.

"The band has never officially released any of those songs," says Bruce Flohr, Senior Vice President of A&R at (DMB's) RCA Records. "As far as they're concerned, all of those songs are still new."

No release date has been set from the new DMB album, but the band has already begun lining up tour dates for spring of 2002.

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Song Stories

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell | 1974

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.

More Song Stories entries »

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