Not much has been said regarding the Dave Matthews Band hiatus that’ll take the group off the road in 2017 for the first time in 25 years, but sitting down for an interview with The Fresh Toast, Matthews shed a little light onto the decision. 

“I think I still feel proud about the unusualness of my band and I love the people that I work with,” he said. “Although, now we’ve been around long enough and things that are around long enough don’t seem that unusual unless they’re awesome like smaller flowers. And I love the band I play with but I just felt as though I was starting to – I had to do something else.”

When asked if Matthews felt a similar feeling when he decided to assemble Dave Matthews & Friends (this year, Matthews will tour extensively with acoustic partner Tim Reynolds) and record his 2003 album Some Devil, he agreed.

“I feel like I need to avoid the analogy of the dragon eating its own tail,” he said. “When you do something the first time, whether you succeed because of your own good work or good luck or because of someone else helping you, when you do a thing a first time, there’s a sort of blindness and courage. But when you do it a second time and when you keep doing it then at some point, for me, it starts to feel like, ‘What am I doing?’”

He continued, “At one point it went from I don’t want it to become a thing that I’m doing because I’ve become an imitation of myself. I don’t want it to become because I have to do it because I did it.”

While he backpedaled slightly from that stance, noting that “not that that’s what it is necessarily,” Matthews also said that “relationships change” over time and this year “I wanted to do something different.” He also mentions that he wasn’t planning on doing anything this year before the urge to play with Reynolds won out. “I love playing with Tim and I don’t get to do it very often because I’m out with the band,” he said. 

This interview surfaces just a day after DMB bassist Stefan Lessard fired off a few pointed tweets regarding the decision to take the year off, noting that “A band that remains active is a band that creates unlimited creativity in all areas. Remaining active does not mean burning out though.”

Read the full interview here which also includes musings on Donald Trump, Matthews’ current stint as a vegan and much more.