Working With Dave Matthews Band Music: What You Actually Need to Know
"So Much To Say" is the second track on Come Tomorrow, the 2021 album that marked the band's first release of original material in nine years. The song runs about five minutes and thirty-four seconds, built around one of Carter Beauford's more restrained drum patterns and a guitar part that shifts between open tunings and standard tuning mid-section. It's not the most complicated DMB track harmonically, but it's where people tend to run into issues if they're trying to transcribe or cover it. When I first sat down to work out the guitar parts for this song, I spent about two hours just trying to nail the intro chord voicings. The problem is that Dave uses a mix of standard tuning and modal interchange in a way that doesn't immediately reveal itself if you're just playing along to the stereo track. The opening chords sound like they're in D major, but there's a flat-7 movement that pulls things toward D Mixolydian briefly before resolving back. I finally got it by isolating the low end with a phase inversion trick and listening to the bass line separately, which made the root movements much clearer.
Where to Find Dave Matthews Band So Much To Say
If you're looking for the track, it's available on all major streaming platforms through RCA Records, the label that has handled DMB distribution since the 2003 split from Columbia. The album came out February 28, 2021. For official lyric sheets and chord charts, the band's own website at davematthewsband.com has a member portal with transcriptions, though access requires a registered account. Third-party tabs exist on sites like Songsterr and Ultimate-Guitar, but the accuracy varies significantly — especially for the later-section fingerstyle passage around the 3:40 mark, where most amateur transcriptions get the right-hand pattern wrong. I've seen at least three different versions of the chord chart floating around online, and two of them are missing the bridge progression entirely. The real progression in that section moves from Bm7 to Gsus4 to add9 before dropping into the final chorus, and if you're just following a generic tab, you'll miss that voice leading. My workaround was to slow the track down to 60 percent speed in Ableton's flex mode and map out each note individually. That approach took me about forty-five minutes total but saved me from learning the song wrong in the first place. The song also shows up in live sets fairly regularly. The band tends to strip it down acoustically on tour, which means the studio recording and the live arrangement diverge more than on some other tracks. If you're learning it for performance purposes, decide early whether you're going for the album version or the live arrangement, because the chord voicings and tempo feel are different enough that mixing the two will sound off.
Common Problems People Hit With This Track
The most frequent issue I see is tempo drift. The studio version sits somewhere around 72 beats per minute, but the feel is loose enough that it wobbles between 68 and 75 depending on the section. A metronome won't help you lock into this song the way it would for something more rigidly quantized. I recommend tracking along with a click only on the downbeats of each measure, then letting go once you have the pulse. Playing strictly to grid makes it sound mechanical and defeats the whole point. Another thing that trips people up is the vocal melody in the second verse. The phrasing lands slightly behind the beat in a way that's easy to miss if you're not already familiar with Dave's approach to syncopation. Singing it on-the-beat will make the lyrics sound awkward and the melody will clash with the guitar part. You have to delay the first syllable of most lines by roughly a sixteenth note to make it sit right. The song also doesn't give you much room for improvisation if you're trying to extend it live. Unlike "Ants at My Shoulder" or "Where You Go," the harmonic structure here is fairly tight and doesn't lend itself to long instrumental breaks without sounding forced. I tried extending the outro during a practice session once and it fell apart after about thirty seconds because the chord changes keep cycling back to the top. The song wants to stay within its structure.
Get the Full Details
There's also the matter of the keyboard and synth layers in the mix. On the record, there are ambient pad sounds that occupy a lot of frequency space in the upper-mid range. If you're stripping this down to just guitar and vocals, the arrangement feels thinner than it should. A simple workaround is to add a low organ or pad sound underneath the verses to fill out the texture without competing with the vocal. It doesn't have to be complex — a sustained C major add9 on a Hammond-style patch works fine. The production on Come Tomorrow as a whole is cleaner and more polished than the band's earlier work, which means individual instruments are more isolated in the mix. That's helpful for transcription but it also means the song relies on production choices to carry some of its emotional weight. When you pull it apart instrument by instrument, you might find it doesn't hit as hard as it does through the full mix. That's normal. It's not a flaw in the song, just a reality of how it was engineered.
