In this work, we went beyond an implicit solvent picture to analyze the chromophore-solvent dynamics and specific chromophore-solvent interactions that contribute to the absorption spectral lineshape and spectral broadening of CV + in methanol. We show that, compared to QM/MM AIMD simulations, molecular dynamics performed with the ab initio parametrized QUBEKit force field does a good job of simulating the chromophore degrees of freedom, but the default procedure of computing partial atomic charges of the chomophore in implicit solvent underestimates the polarization due to explicit solvent that occurs with the QM/MM chromophoresolvent model. Re-parametrizing the force field with charges computed from explicit solvent snapshots improves the chromophore-solvent description, resulting in H-bond formation aligned with what we observe in the QM/MM trajectory.