The Dave Matthews Band are back in the running for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame following their 2024 nomination. Their first came back in 2020, when they actually won the Fan Vote but still didn’t make it into the Hall. “The Space Between” ranks as one of their biggest hits, a lovely ballad that sheds much of the instrumental interplay for which the band is known in favor of a concise approach.
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What does “The Space Between” mean? Who helped Matthews write it? And how did that writing partnership come about only after a failed attempt to record with a longtime collaborator of the band? Answers to come, as we look at a song where the DMB tried something a little different and came up with a major winner in the process.
“Between” Collaborators
Considering the success of their first three albums, all released in the second half of the 1990s, the Dave Matthews Band didn’t seem like an outfit that needed to a make a major change heading into album No. 4. As a matter of fact, they at least initially intended to keep things status quo, working on a batch of new songs with producer Steve Lillywhite, who had helmed their first three records.
But Matthews & Co. shelved those recordings after they struggled to make much progress with the downbeat material he had written. The bandleader instead headed out to California to work with Glen Ballard, whose impressive work as a rock songwriter-for-hire had been proven time and again on classics like Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Initially intending to work on the Matthews’ songs that were already in progress, the pair instead worked up a whole new batch of songs. Those tracks, including “The Space Between,” became the basis for DMB’s 2001 album Everyday.
Ballard told Songfacts about his interpretation of “The Space Between” and how the collaboration with Matthews went. “It’s probably an apology—that’s the way I see it,” he said. “It’s telling the person who is most vivid in your life, whenever we’ve been apart, I want to make sure that we’re back together.”
“We never really talked about what anything meant, we just wrote it,” Ballard continued. “We were writing it just like playing tennis, and that one kind of wrote itself. In fact, all of them did, because we wrote so many so quickly. He is such an adept lyricist and I think I am too, so we didn’t have any struggle figuring it out.”
One interesting side note: In March 2001, just weeks after Everyday was released and a month before “The Space Between” started working its way up the charts (eventually reaching No. 22 in the U.S., the band’s biggest hit to that point), a bootleg copy of the material the DMB had abandoned appeared on the internet as The Lillywhite Sessions. It made big news at the time, with critics comparing its dark, searching songs with the tight, relatively upbeat Everyday. Matthews would rerecord many of those songs for posterity on the 2002 record Busted Stuff.
The Meaning of “The Space Between”
It’s fitting that the music of “The Space Between” veers between grungy guitar chords in the verses and sweet, tinkling arpeggios in the chorus. After all, the lyrics focus on the duality of a relationship, and the title refers to where the narrator hopes to meet up with his lover, in a place free from all the highs and lows that don’t always represent the true nature of the thing.
He makes it clear from the start that he’s up for the challenge: You cannot quit me so quickly, Matthews grumbles, emphasizing the line’s internal rhyme. And yet there’s uncertainty there. Note how the question But will I hold you again? emerges every time the spell of the chorus breaks and the song returns to a grittier environment.
The words chosen by Matthews and Ballard alternate between piercingly honest and strikingly silly, like in these lines: We’re strange allies / With warring hearts / What a wild-eyed beast you be. The narrator can endure that, because he believes that the common middle ground will eventually sustain them. Take my hand / ‘Cause we’re walking out of here, he implores her.
Thus, in between the tears and the laughter, lies a benevolent haven for these two. And, come to think of it, for two people in the middle of any romantic relationship. “The Space Between” may indeed have proven to be a bit of a departure for the Dave Matthews Band. It might even have been a calculated bid for chart success. None of that prevents it from being a gorgeous slow song with plenty on its busy mind and within its trembling heart.
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Photo by Rich Polk/Getty Images On Location
