Tonight in Austin, Dave Matthews Band will hit the stage to kick off their annual summer tour. Once again, they’ll present one acoustic set and one electric much like they did last year, to largely mixed reviews. Variety was a problem for DMB last year, with the acoustic sets especially becoming stale towards the middle and back half of the tour. They’ll look to buck that trend beginning tonight, with a “Legends on Letterman” set under their belts which yielded a new song. A good omen, one would think. 

A (sort of) new wrinkle this year will be the addition of previously announced special guests. Joining the band along the way this year at select stops will be Emmylou Harris and Bela Fleck, as of right now. Surely, fans should expect more collaborations to come in the future. With that, let’s take a look back at some of DMB’s best collaborative moments last year.

“Spoon” w/Brandi Carlile & Mike McCready

Most definitely the highlight of the band’s summer tour, Brandi Carlile and Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready surprised when they jumped on stage for a supped-up version of “Spoon.” McCready used his playing on Pearl Jam songs like “Nothing As It Seems” to really find his way inside the tone of the song, matching Tim Reynolds, Beauford and the horn section perfectly on the jam. “Spoon” also needs a female vocalist to stand out and Carlile gives it that added touch. 

“Snow Outside” w/Bela Fleck

Out of all the guests, Bela Fleck seeps into the fabric of the band’s sound the smoothest. Granted, he’s been sitting in with the band for a majority of their career, but his ability to listen and improvise when necessary makes him an immediate jolt to any DMB show. He brings out the best in them, and did so once again on this version of “Snow Outside” from earlier in the summer. One of the newer songs in the band’s catalog (and, interestingly enough, one of two songs on Away From the World where the whole band receives writing credits), Fleck turns it into a Flecktones-esque hoedown as him, Coffin and Rashawn Ross veer off into one of the finer moments from the acoustic sets this year. 

“Rhyme & Reason” w/Joe Lawlor

Lawlor is always at the band’s expense, as he is part of the crew, but this isn’t your everyday crew member sit-in. Lawlor can play and the man rips up “Rhyme & Reason” as he does here. He’s good for one or two of these a year, and this is a real good one. 

“Drunken Soldier” w/The Lovely Ladies

The Lovely Ladies are a sore spot in the minds of longtime DMB fans. They mucked up so many songs in their more consistent days sitting in with the band, and even made some of the band’s less-desirable songs even more undesirable (who can forget those endless “Angel”‘s from the early 2000s?). So when they started popping up in 2014, the DMB fanbase was left uneasy–that is until they played “Drunken Soldier” with The Ladies on vocals. If “Drunken Soldier” couldn’t get any more Pink Floyd-y, it happened with the female vocals on the ending refrain. Certainly not an original idea, but a damn good result.