I’m planning on downloading Dave Matthews’ latest album, Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, out of nostalgia.  I bought their last album, Stand Up,  out of guilt.  I felt bad that I had essentially abandoned a band I used to really pay attention to, that truly factored into a large part of my personal history.  But with the new one, it’s gonna be because I’m thinking, quite simply, about how time changes things.

When saxophonist LeRoi Moore died last year, I felt like I had lost something.  Which is unusual for me.  I’m not typically affected much by celebrity deaths.  And it’s not like I even knew what Moore looked like.  I’ve never seen the band in concert — my entire knowledge of them is through their recordings.  But there has always been something about DMB that no other act in my pop and rock universe has and that is a unique ability to have every single member of the band power through the speakers as a distinctive voice that seems as irreplaceable as Matthews himself.  Most bands have foreground and background members — DMB feels like five soloists who have learned to blend together perfectly.

And yet, I stopped listening to them years ago.  Even when the Ipod is on full random, I tend to skip DMB.

For about a decade, between 1994 and 2003, this band wore a proverbial groove into our CD player.  My wife and I were not early adopters — we can’t say that we were buying bootlegs before Under the Table and Dreaming came out — but we were enthusiastic bandwagoneers once the band hit the mainstream.  That first album is one of those gems where there are no bad tracks.

One of the unusual quirks about my relationship with the band is that the first single from any given album is rarely among my favorites.  They tend to be the least interesting, most straightforward four-minute pop-rock song (which of course is why they are also usually big accessible hits).  Their other characteristic tends to be Matthews getting “growly,” to use my wife’s word.  On the first album, it was What Would You Say.  Lead singles on the next three albums that followed all had the same vibe:  So Much to Say, Don’t Drink the Water and I Did It.  Honestly, if those songs had been all DMB had to offer, I wouldn’t have made it past the first album.

The songs I like best are those that snuck up on me.  The ones where the rhythms are a little bit off from the standard 4/4.  Where you’re not quite sure you like it and then you suddenly can’t stop humming it.  On Under the Table, it was Ants Marching, Satellite, Jimi Thing and Warehouse that all fit the bill.  On later albums, the songs became a little less jarring on first listen, but I can’t say if that was inherent to the songs themselves or my growing indoctrination into what the band was trying to do.  Either way, tracks like Crash, Stay, The Space Between and Everyday are permanent residents on my list of favorite songs.

Look, I’ll be honest.  It is rare for me to devote that much energy to any one group.  I own eight Dave Matthews albums, including Live at Luther College.  I don’t buy live albums — it’s not who I am.  Only R.E.M. and U2 come close to taking up that much Ipod real estate.

Still, by the time Busted Stuff came out, I was getting worn out.  My wife had already stopped listening.  But I soldiered on through Matthews’ solo album, Some Devil.  And I wasn’t disappointed exactly.  The lyrics and the feel seemed to be getting darker - such as on the devastating Gravedigger and the deeply sad Grace Is Gone.  I loved those songs and many others, but the albums and the back catalog found themselves becoming more and more rare on my playlists.

I bought Stand Up, as I said, but I have barely listened to it.  It is buried somewhere on my hard drive and deep within the 5000 cuts on my Ipod.  It rarely surfaces.  I’ve just lost interest.  And I wonder whether I changed or the band changed or if it even matters because in reality it is just another way to realize that time marches on regardless.

I wanted to write this before I buy the new album.  I don’t want to review it.  I just want to spend a little time alone with it.  Already, the first single sounds like the typical pattern from the past albums I loved, all growly and relatively straight-up in its pop-rock sensibilities.  The fact that I don’t love that particular song paradoxically gives me hope for the album as a whole.

So I’m looking forward to June 2 when it drops.  Kind of like waiting for a visit from an old friend I’ve lost touch with.  Hoping we’ll remember why we liked each other in the first place.