Songfacts®:

• Dave Matthews says this song, the second single from their 1996 album Crash, is about discovering who you are as an individual: "It's something that we learn when we're children and trusting and naïve. Everything seems so simple, until we find out, well, not necessarily find out, we just become actors and actresses, trying to portray ourselves the best possible way we can. Sometimes it's natural, and sometimes we can just be ourselves and it's enough. But other times it seems we have to do ourselves better."
• Matthews wrote the song with DMB violinist Boyd Tinsley and with Peter Griesar, who played keyboards with the band from 1990 to 1993. Griesar remembers the trio began working on the song in 1992 while they were hanging out at then-lawyer Ross Hoffman's apartment.
  
  "The harmonies came up just literally from singing and playing along, and goofing up, for two or three hours one time," he told Morgan Delancey, author of The Dave Matthews Band: Step Into The Light. Although he helped write it, Griesar doesn't play on the tune, having left the band three years before Crash was released. The result is a more straightforward rock song as opposed to the calypso vibe it initially had with Griesar's keyboards.
• The band performed this on the April 20, 1996 episode of Saturday Night Live. It was their second of four appearances on the show as musical guests.
• "So Much To Say" won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal in 1997, beating Garbage's "Stupid Girl," Oasis' "Wonderwall," The Smashing Pumpkins' "1979" and The Wallflowers' "Sixth Avenue Heartache."
• "So Much To Say" wasn't released until 1996 but the song dates back to 1992, when they first started playing it live. Like many of their songs, they refined it on the road long before rolling tape to record it in the studio.
  
  By the time the band signed with RCA Records in 1993, they had a huge following in the Virgina area where they were based, and also a lot of original songs in their repertoire written by Matthews. It's telling that "So Much To Say" didn't even make their first two albums: Remember Two Things in 1993 and Under the Table and Dreaming in 1994.
• The song got a lot of airplay and made a few different Billboard charts but not the Hot 100 - like all their early songs, it wasn't sold as a single and thus ineligible for that chart. The band first got on the radio with "What Would You Say" in the summer of 1995. "Ants Marching" followed, then "Satellite," all from their 1994 major-label debut album, Under the Table and Dreaming. When they released their Crash album in 1996, "Satellite" was still floating around on playlists, and "Too Much," the album's lead single, joined it. "So Much To Say" came next, inducing a bit of DMB fatigue, but through no fault of the band - they'd had these songs for years but they were all getting discovered nationally over a short period of time. "Crash Into Me," "Two Step" and "Tripping Billies" all followed from Crash. After, casual fans dropped off, leaving DMB with a substantial and loyal fanbase the went to lots of their shows (like the Grateful Dead they varied their setlists and played the songs different ways at every concert) and bought all their albums as soon as they came out - their next seven albums, starting with Before These Crowded Streets in 1998, all debuted at #1.
• The band's saxophone player, LeRoi Moore, pushed Matthews to make his vocals more sax-like, which you can hear on this song as he modulates his voice up and down like the instrument. You can hear it pretty clearly on the line "open up my head and let me out."
• The band played part of "So Much To Say" when they entered the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2024, four years after they won the fan vote in 2020, which apparently isn't binding. They won the vote again in 2024 and that time were allowed in.