Song Review: “Busted Stuff” by Dave Matthews Band (Album: Busted Stuff)

First of all, this song really creates a sense of musicality combined with a lot of emotion added in. As a musician, I hear all of the little intertwining musical parts, and I wonder how a band could do such an amazing job at creating a song. Let’s go through the instruments:

1. Acoustic Guitar
   The acoustic guitar is not doing much of a traditional kind of strumming pattern, but it provides a very capturing sequence. The chords change often, and so the acoustic simply does the rhythm according to the changing of chords. When you realize that Dave Matthews is doing these chord changes as well as singing with a different rhythm, you realize he had to have put a lot of work into this song.
2. Drums
   Carter Beauford, one of my favourite drummers of all time, has got a way of combining the various drum parts into a musical drumming masterpiece. Not only does he team with the other musicians of the band in establishing the rhythmic foundation, but he also fills in the empty space between chords with delightful touches, such as using the cymbal bell, an open hi-hat, and the essence of swing 16th notes, even so far as including 16th triplets in some of the fills, and different syncopated snares throughout the entire song.
3. Bass
   For most of the song, Stefan Lessard adjusts his bass to be plucked on the chord changes, with a few extra notes to add in that bass flavour. However, you can really see the bass shine when the band goes into a sort of jazz portion of their song at around 2:52 into the song. He starts placing all sorts of notes that make it apparent that he really knows what he is doing. If you listen all the way to the very end of the song, you’ll even notice him doing many quick fills, as the song is fading out.
4. Saxophone
   The saxophone doesn’t really appear until the jazz portion of the song at 2:52. It then takes over the role of lead. It is a delightfully smooth and almost sexy part of the song that injects a different tone of emotion into the song.
5. Electric Guitar
   The electric guitar in this song is very soft, just doing soft “wah’s” in the background. This layer of sound adds to the very essence, and although subtle, is very needed.
6. Vocals
   Dave Matthews did a great job, and shows off a bit of his range. He does a lot of different vocal tricks in this song, including fades, and a little vocal scatting during the jazz section of the song. He even goes into his falsetto mode at around 1:37 as well as 2:25 and 2:51.

All in all, the Dave Matthews Band did an amazing job creating this song. It is worth a good listen. The song’s feel goes from an emotional romance at the beginning to having a little bit of a depressive kind of feel, but that is also reflected in the words of the song. Matching the words with the feel is part of what makes great songs.

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