Songoftheday 8/31/23 - Don't hide away Like an ocean that you can't see, but you can smell and the sound of waves crash down...

 

 

"Where Are You Going" - Dave Matthews Band

from the albums Busted Stuff and Mr. Deeds (Original Soundtrack) (both 2002)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #39 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 2

 

Today's song comes from the Dave Matthews Band, who had scored their first official top-40 hit on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 (due to rule changes allowing album cuts to chart) in the summer of 2001 with "The Space Between" from the album Everyday. However the tight production and bright and shiny songs turned off as many fans and they gained from the mainstream exposure. In response, Matthews and the group went back and revisited material they originally recorded for an album with producer Steve Lillywhite that was scrapped. Some of the re-recorded tracks were included on their next album Busted Stuff. One of the pair that wasn't, "Where Are You Going", was released as the lead single, although it also appeared on the soundtrack to the Adam Sandler movie Mr. Deeds which came out a month prior. Written by Matthews and produced by Stephen Harris, the lyrics lay out a romantic but realistic view, with Dave acting as sometime therapist sometime lover wanting to just be where his partner is. It's not creepy though, but rather calming, and the production behind it being just as much so, almost to make it seem like a Coldplay backing track. The result got radio at least back on board with another crossover hit. The music video features scenes from the film with Sandler and co-star Wynona Ryder unconvincingly play a couple in love...

"Where Are You Going" became the band's second "official" top-40 hit on Billboard's Hot 100 in September of 2002 (they had hits before on the pop airplay chart).On the radio, the song climbed to #33 on the Mainstream Top-40 airplay chart, peaked at #20 on the Alternative Rock radio list, and spent four weeks at #3 on Billboard's older-skewing Adult Top-40 station panel. But its biggest success was on the newly-hatched Adult Album Alternative (or "Triple-A") Rock format, where it topped the list for seven weeks. The Busted Stuff album, released in July of that year, took a week at #1 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, selling over two million copies. Meanwhile, the Mr. Deeds soundtrack, which came out the month prior, peaked at #61 on the Billboard 200. At the Grammy Awards in 2003, "Where Are You Going" was nominated for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance with Vocals, which criminally went to No Doubt for their horrid "Hey Baby". 

A second track from Busted Stuff, "Grace Is Gone" (one of the Lillywhite holdovers), made it to #4 on that Triple-A Rock chart in Billboard, but sadly the beautiful song was a little too free-flow perhaps to make an impression anywhere else. That was followed by the peppier adult-pop of "Grey Street", which also hit the Triple-A top-ten at #5, but also got to #18 on the Adult Top-40 format and #33 on the Alternative Rock radio chart. 

The band will be back to the series. 

(8/10)

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Here's the band performing the song at their Central Park concert in 2003...

Next up, Dave and the guys brought "Where Are You Going" to their Storytellers episode on VH1 in 2005...

and lastly, Matthews did a home recording of the song for Sirius XM during the quarantine era...

Up tomorrow: A boy-band bro breaks out.