The recordings later emerged on the Internet shortly after the release of Everyday, and created controversy among fans as well as the music industry, which was early in its campaign to curb illegal file downloads.

For this album, the band purchased a house near their hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia and converted a portion of it into a recording studio.

The band eventually decided to scrap the sessions, and perform their summer tour without a completed album to support.

The band played a number of new songs that summer from those sessions, including "Grey Street," "Raven," "Sweet Up and Down," "Grace Is Gone," "Bartender," "Digging a Ditch" and the reworked "JTR."

The title The Summer So Far was simply the name of the band's most current recording of the sessions, dubbed by engineer Stephen Harris, who later produced Busted Stuff.

During the time they spent together, Matthews and Ballard wrote an entire album of new songs before the rest of the band had joined them.

The album, which featured electric guitar by Matthews and a minimal use of the rest of the band, was released in February 2001 as Everyday.

About a week ago, I received an E-mail from a DMB fan who claimed they had some unreleased material from the new Dave Matthews Band CD.

I guess my question is simply this: Am I disrespecting the Dave Matthews Band and Steve Lillywhite by making these songs available?

The clips that were released are recordings that Wiley made over the phone while his source played the tracks therefore they have notoriously bad audio quality, but provide a glimpse into what the band was doing during the early part of The Lillywhite Sessions.

Below is a copy of the text file that accompanied the internet-circulated demo:[5] Once the album leaked, attention by fans and media escalated.

In 2002 the Dave Matthews Band released Busted Stuff, a new album which contained re-recordings of many of the songs that were left collecting dust with Sessions.

"JTR" returned as part of the band's concert rotation, having appeared on the Live at Folsom Field album and played during the 2006 summer tour.

[8] The song would make a return a decade later on February 28, 2020, at a one-off DMB show at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas.

In April 2006, a self-described recording engineer using the alias of "Karmageddon" mastered the tracks from The Lillywhite Sessions and released them on the Internet.