Belly Belly Nice

Dave Matthews Band built their reputation on jazz-inflected jams and sprawling arrangements, and this track leans into that world with a kind of loose, sweaty joy. The rhythm section locks into a groove that feels descended from funk and New Orleans second-line simultaneously, while Matthews' acoustic guitar dances against it rather than driving it. Horns punctuate the verses like exclamation points. The production has a live-room humidity to it — you can almost feel the temperature of the studio. Matthews' voice is characteristically off-kilter, bending syllables in unexpected directions, full of hiccups and slides that somehow work every time. The lyric operates in the mode of pure physical celebration, a song about being alive in a body and finding that sufficient reason to move. This is music for outdoor amphitheaters, for summer festivals where the crowd has been together long enough to feel like one organism, for the moment a concert tips from a performance into a collective experience. DMB occupied a particular position in American music through the nineties and early 2000s — the jam band that frat houses and philosophy students both claimed — and this track captures why: it offers both abandon and craft in the same breath.