Dave Matthews recently sat down for an interview with SiriusXM’s Ari Fink at Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate NY. The two discussed an array of topics ranging from politics and religion to Dave Matthews Band’s next album and current summer tour.

The wide ranging conversation began with an update on new music: “I think we have a great record,” Dave Matthews shared, referring to Dave Matthews Band’s forthcoming album. “We finished, for now, the recording and then we were mixing and my friend, Rob Evans, who’s been really the force behind getting it done and been a great, you know, it wouldn’t have happened without him and it’s been fun to work with him. And so essentially we have to just put it in the bag and send it out into the world.” He added, “[Every] time I walk into the studio and we’re listening to mixes, I say, ‘Ooh,’ and then, you know, there’s another little song.”

Ari Fink chimed in, suggesting, “[That] last 1% or the last half percent or maybe even once you get to 99.9% done that last 0.1% of the record must be so impossible,” to which Matthews responded saying one of the biggest challenges was turning the collection of songs into an album.

“It’s sort of, it’s a little bit hard to clean it up and so, you know, it’s not even just like sweeping things together in the sequence and getting the art and all those things are not, you know, necessarily necessary, but I’m because I’m old, I’m attached to the idea of a collection. Maybe the next collection of songs will just be songs we put out on the internet. … Or the streaming. I mean, wherever you put it. The whole world is a spider web,” Matthews said.

Dave Matthews Shares Update On New Album

The conversation then turned from music to the treacherous topics of politics and religion. Dave Matthews explained that he sees justifying government decisions through religious beliefs as a “slippery slope.”

I’m not anti-Christian or anti-religion, but you know, if the way people are talking about Christianity and how this government should be governed by Christian ideals, and that we need to weed out those people that are examples of un-Christian or immoral behavior, that’s very dangerous language and it may seem like it’s coming from a good place, but that language can be exploited and it’s a very dangerous language. And obviously people react when this name is brought up, but if you look at old speeches from people like Hitler or Idi Amin and they talk about for the greater good for righteousness for, you know, to fight ungodliness, that is a precursor to potentially terrible, terrible, terrible times because you’re listening to ideas of one small group and that one small group is being exploited by the ideas of even a smaller group and it brings people from the margins into the mainstream, but it also takes the mainstream into marginal ideas and the ideas that should be marginalized like speaking for God or speaking for what is right or speaking for the judgment, being the judge on God’s behalf. That’s terrible, terrible, terrible rhetoric and it’s terrifying to me because these kinds of things don’t happen slowly. We have to be vigilant in this country to prevent ourselves from falling into the hands of people that will not allow it to come back without a much more desperate fight than the one we’re having right now.

… [As] soon as morality becomes a tool to exclude people or include a small percentage of people and to oppress people because they are viewed as immoral or wrong, as soon as that happens, as policy, things begin to crumble and, you know, unfortunately very often in those instances, the people, the minority, the radicals that don’t like to be called radicals are much more eager to do harm and much more eager to pull triggers and commit violence and it’s just something that we should do more than hope will go away, and even if it’s our drowning hope, we should do more with it than without it.

Dave Matthews Discusses Justifying Government Decisions Through Religious Beliefs

Next Ari and Dave delved into the topics of guns and abortion rights: “The beliefs of a few people are being, you know, indulged while … the rights of many more people are being taken away, whether it’s the right to feel free from gun violence in a public square or having the right to control your own body, you know, and that’s the part that’s sort of I think the reason that there’s a visceral response is unless you’re in support of those things, your beliefs and your hopes or what you think is right or your liberties are infringed upon, so it has a different stink to it.”

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He went on to say that the purpose of government action should be to expand rights, not reduce them: “[These] decisions … sort of, for me, seem unique in that way. Usually the decisions have been in the opposite direction whether it’s about, you know, hate crime or whether it’s about liberty or about civil rights or a lot of these decisions that are made sort of increase who’s protected and it wasn’t the case. It’s not the case right now. So hopefully we can get the other arms of government to take action, to protect people from those things. Protect people’s rights.”

Matthews condemned nefarious efforts to limit voting, saying, “[It’s] frustrating because there’s definitely enormous efforts to make voting, especially in big cities with more pedestrian populations, but also in underserved communities, to make it more difficult to vote. So then it’s even like, well, look, we voted and we had the house, we have the presidency again, and it seems like it’s doing nothing. It’s doing the opposite.”

He continued:

I understand people saying, “Nothing works, voting doesn’t work,” but I do think that this, and I mean maybe it’s my drowning faith in the potential for the system, but that faith still thinks that if everybody says, “Despite your efforts to stop me from being able to have my voice heard through my vote, despite your effort to through claims of fraud, which have never been verified, despite your efforts to make it harder for me to vote, I’m still gonna vote,” and then, you know, ground level efforts to curtail those enforceable laws that are stopping people from being able to get to the polls whether it’s removing drop boxes or whatever the efforts are in different states, it’s different things, please everybody should go and vote.

Dave Matthews Addresses Guns, Abortion, And Voting Rights

[Videos via SiriusXM’s Dave Matthews Band Radio/Ari Fink]

Listen to Dave Matthews’ interview with SiriusXM’s Ari Fink in its entirety via Dave Matthews Band Radio on the SXM App.