The Devil and Dave Matthews

"That's right, Kitty. You're beautiful, but I'm not going to touch you. I don't know where you've been, and I hope you're not related to the devil." These days it's hard for Dave Matthews to trust anything, not even a small black cat desperate for attention. He doesn't need any more bad luck. "Trouble, get behind me now," he sings on his solo debut, Some Devil. "Trouble, let me be." He acknowledges that his best album with Dave Matthews Band is five years behind him and says no God gives a shit about him and that suicide crosses his mind more often than you may think. "I've been in situations where I haven't been able to see how I'll get by," he says. But Matthews also says he has a "pretty solid sense of joy." He is happily married, his two-year-old twin girls, Grace and Stella, worship him, and, as he puts it, he makes "an exorbitant living," estimated to be north of $20 million annually. In order to stay out of a lunatic asylum, Matthews has resolved to distract himself with projects, big and small. There's the solo album, which expands on Matthews' constant themes of loss, death and love; a craft project that involves designing and hand-painting a deck of cards; a president he vows to remove from the White House; the winery he operates on his Virginia estate; and ATO Records, the label he oversees (David Gray, Ben Kweller, My Morning Jacket and five others are signed to ATO). "I want to, as desperately and joyfully as possible, fill my life with unusual experiences -- make my life full of challenges and accept them," he says. "Change is like a vacation." What's taking over his fantasies at the moment is the thought of writing the next DMB album at the band's brand-new studio complex in Charlottesville, Virginia. "It's, like, my crazed ambition."

In Thibodaux, Louisiana, a bayou town fifty miles southwest of New Orleans, Matthews, who will turn thirty-seven on January 9th, has diverted his short attention span to acting. Sporting a full beard, he's on the set of Because of Winn-Dixie, directed by Wayne Wang. Matthews plays an ex-con drifter who arrives in Naomi, Florida, and settles in as the owner of a pet shop, where he imparts his wisdom to a young girl. He'll also contribute new songs to the soundtrack. "I always said that if I ever do a part in a movie, I would refuse to play music," he says. "But I realized that this is the perfect part for me." His character, Otis, has trouble stringing thoughts together without a guitar in his hand.

The day after the movie wraps, Matthews races back to his home in Seattle -- where the family is living while his wife, Ashley, studies holistic medicine -- to begin rehearsals for a tour supporting Some Devil. The beard is gone. In the kitchen of Studio Litho, where he spent seven months recording the album, Matthews welcomes guitarists Trey Anastasio and Tim Reynolds. They spend the afternoon listening to potential covers, playing along to Little Feat's "Spanish Moon" and the Band's "Up on Cripple Creek."

"This song is eerily appropriate," says Anastasio, as Paul Simon's "American Tune" blares through the monitors.

Matthews begins singing along: "And I dreamed I was dying." Two creases form between his closed eyes, and a large glass of Scotch and a cigarette are nestled in his right hand. "And I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly/And, looking back down at me, smiled reassuringly."

There's a lot of death on "Some Devil": "Gravedigger" kills off four people in three verses, and in "So Damn Lucky," you describe an elongated moment before a car accident. Does that song stem from a near-death experience?

Well, I've been in a few car wrecks. I think five -- one or two serious -- before I ever drove a car. I was growing up in South Africa at a time when the youth was reckless, irreverent and excited knowing that the future of the country was uncertain. My circle of friends was very aware that the welcome demise of apartheid was all but upon us, and that made for a reckless kind of abandon that made for a lot of recreational excess.

Like getting high and driving fast?

Yeah. I never drove. I was always in the car with some maniac. I'm familiar with that feeling of silence that comes with a very imminent catastrophe, when you know you have absolutely no control over a situation. Most recently, I was with my wife in the back seat of a friend's car. It was raining, and there was all this traffic and chaos in Johannesburg. A car came flying past us, through a red light. Then we heard screeching tires, and I looked behind us to see another car piling toward us. I remember thinking, "I should tell everyone in the car that we're about to get smashed." Then, bam! It couldn't have been more than a second or two, but there was so much time to look around. Maybe when all responsibility for anything is taken out of our hands, then suddenly we have a lot of time to bear witness. So I thought [for "So Damn Lucky"] it was funny to make that analogy with your life spinning out of control.