A Conversation with Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas – HuffPost 7.30.12

Mike Ragogna: Rob, hi, let’s talk about North, your new Matchbox Twenty album. When you guys got together to make this album, what was the experience like versus how you approached your other albums?

Rob Thomas: We started out completely differently because we all worked together for the first time. Usually, I would just write everything and bring it in and the band would just arrange them. But over the time that I had been writing a solo record, the guys–Paul (Doucette) and Kyle (Cool)–had become really good writers. We wanted to see what we could do if we started off together. So, inherently, everything was different from the beginning. We started and we came up with like sixty song ideas and we had to move to this cabin in the middle of the woods in Nashville that had this studio attached to it. We just went there to try and sort through those sixty ideas to try and figure out which ones of those were songs and what kind of record it was that we wanted to make.

MR: You must have been surprised at the level of songwriting that was happening during that process, because you’d written alone until that point, right?

RT: Yeah. Even when I collaborate, to some degree, I kind of come in with the start of an idea and I’ll work with another artist on that, or I’ll bring them a song. I was really surprised to see what would happen with us when we’d sit down from zero and somebody just starts playing guitar. Because they’re coming up with a chord progression or a rhythm that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own, the melodies that come out from me would be completely different, or the melody that Paul comes up with sparks an idea in me and takes me in a different direction than I would’ve gone. I think it was a good time for us, after making the amount of records we’ve made together, and then not being together for so long, it was a good time to do something that would keep us on our toes, and I think this kind of did that.

MR: Why the title “North“?

RT: North, for us, is all about directional north. When you’re lost, you find north, and that helps you find your way. When we were going through all of this stuff we were trying to figure out, we had sixty different ideas, and if you take them all apart, they could fit into three different albums. There were ten of these songs that could’ve been a really great acoustic/alt country kind of record, ten of these songs were really super-poppy, almost in Rihanna land, and ten of these songs were kind of like old alternative rock, traditional vibe. So that whole process was trying to figure out “Who are we right now?” That was kind of like trying to find our direction, so “North” is really appropriate.

MR: What happens to all of these songs that didn’t get recorded?

RT: Well, some of them we’ll wind up using for overseas and iTunes bonus disks with extra tracks on them. Some of them will wait around, though. Maybe that alt country/acoustic record is the next thing that we have, and we have some great songs for that. And some of them, after a year of touring, we’ll go back and listen to them and say, “You know, they weren’t as good as we thought they were,” and we’ll throw them out and start all over.

MR: In “Put Your Hands Up,” it seems like you’re standing up for your right to express yourself, on the dance floor of all places, but really, in any place. It’s sort of symbolic in a lot of ways. It’s a very empowering song.

RT: For me, because this was one that I wrote, it was actually an experiment in positivity, trying not to be cynical in any way or having a dark side to it, but unapologetically writing a song about a person who’s had a really hard time and needs to go to a club on a Saturday night and dance. I remember sitting there and writing the line, “Leave your heart out on the dance floor,” and just staring at the page going, “Really? Am I going to write this? I’m going to do this, aren’t I. I’m going to write a song that has ‘leave your heart out on the dance floor’ right in the middle of it.” I wanted to do a track that sounded kind of danceable, but didn’t sound like a “track”; we wanted it to sound like a band playing something; almost more akin to seventies disco than it is to dance music today.

MR: That’s what I was going to say, this doesn’t really sound like Skrillex or Deadmau5.

RT: We’re a band…we love pop music and we wanted to do something that we thought was kind of dance-y and pop, but we wanted it to come from us.

MR: “She’s so Mean” is the single.

RT: Yeah, that’s the single. I actually just saw the first edit for the video about an hour ago.

MR: One of the catchier lines is, “She’s a ‘hardcore, candy store, give me some more’ girl.”

RT: The whole idea of the song is, you want something and you know it’s bad for you, but you want it anyway. That could be true with drugs or alcohol or women or a man.

MR: Yeah, the emphasis isn’t on the mean-ness, it’s about what’s tempting you. It’s the bad thing being flaunted.

RT: Yeah. In this particular situation, the thing we were using to represent it just happened to be kind of a mean girl. Everyone I know has been in that relationship, and every girl I know has been in that relationship with kind of a mean guy who, for some reason, didn’t leave when they should. I’m sure that’s something my therapist could tell me about.

MR: (laughs) In one of the most powerful songs on the album, “Overjoyed,” it sounds like you’re trying to uplift someone, but like an anthem, it’s message uplifts everyone.

RT: “Overjoyed” is one of two or three band favorites. I think it’s actually going to be our second single. We’re really excited about that one. We think it’s a pretty song. It makes us feel warm and fuzzy and that’s always good to have one on there.

MR: “Our Song” also is an interesting concept.

RT: To me, there was something really fun about the idea of, in real time, “If we don’t have anything at all, we’ll have this thing that I’m writing right now. This could be our thing. I’ll make it up as we go along.” The thing can be arbitrary, as long as you find something the two of you can share. It’s almost like you create this thing, like you’re little kids and your mom is mad at you so you make an ashtray, like, “No, mom, I have this!” This song is like my gift.

MR: This is your ashtray.

RT: This song is my badly carved clay ashtray.

MR: (laughs) Okay, with “Parade,” I think the concept is that nobody wants the parade to pass them by.

RT: If you kind of equate life in general to being a little kid in a small town watching the parade go, and you want to stay there for as long as you can, you don’t want to miss anything at all and then you equate that to the way life is; you don’t want that to pass you by. You want to go out there and see as much as you can and not miss anything.

MR: You’ve had great opportunities come your way because of the success of the band and also with your solo projects to basically do whatever you want and, like we were just saying, not let the parade pass you by. Are there a few things that you need to get to yet?

RT: Yeah. Professionally, there’s always something. I think most musicians I know only feel as talented as whatever they just did. We’ll make this record and for a few months, we’ll feel supremely talented, and then we’ll feel like hacks and we’ll have to go and make another record to make us feel better. Your main goal in this is always to have a career in this business–and not just a career, but a long-term career. Even success, like a great level of success, is kind of a key that gets you in the door and gives you the opportunity to take the ride to have this lifelong career. But then everything you do, every step along the way, is kind of opening another door. So if you have a record that’s received well and people enjoy it and you go out and have a nice tour, you think, “Okay, yeah, I get to make another record.” You get to see what the next step of your career is. You’re trying not to think too far ahead because the best records are the ones where you start writing and when you’re done, you look back and you listen to it and you say, “That’s who I am, that’s where I am right now,” as opposed to going, “Well, I’m going to make this pop record” or “I’m going to make this concept record.” For us, it’s a lot more fun to kind of find ourselves throughout the process.

MR: And your sound has been evolving since your debut album, Yourself, or Someone Like You.

RT: If you listen back to “3 AM” and “Push” and then you move forward to the next record with songs like “Bent” or “Disease” and “Unwell” or solo stuff that I did, it all comes from me, so there’s this common thread that runs through it, but they all sound kind of like different records. They all came from the same producer as well so I think it’s all about just listening to your inner voice of where you are right now as opposed to saying “Well I made this record and this record was really successful, so how do I make this record again to continue the success?” You’re not guaranteed anything no matter what you do, so you might as well go out and try and do something different from what you did before.

MR: Rob, what advice do you have for new artists?

RT: I think that’s it. If you’re going to start now, the first thing is, in this celebrity-obsessed world that we’re orbiting around right now, you have to do it because you love to do it. You have to do it because you’re going to do it whether you’re successful or not. If everything doesn’t work out, you can’t see yourself doing anything else and not because you want to become famous. If you want to become famous, go do something else. Go cut off your b*lls on YouTube or something. You’ll be a million hits in a minute. But you have to do it because you love music and because music really means something to you. From that point on, consider it your first record every time you do something. I get into this process when I’m starting to write where I don’t buy new music. I listen back to all the old stuff that I loved or I listen to nothing at all. I just try and hear the songs that are in my head as opposed to trying to chase down whatever’s popular. For us, we want to make sure we fit in, we’d like our songs to be heard on the radio, but we don’t want to sound like anything that’s on the radio. We want to be there making our own noise, and that’s kind of hard to do if you’re playing Follow the Leader every time you’re writing a song.

MR: And you seem to have done that with each new album.

RT: I think there’s been an evolution. We are a pop rock band; that’s who we are, that’s what we do. I’ve been fortunate enough to write with Willie Nelson and Big Boi from Outkast and Mary J. Blige and Seal and Marc Anthony, and I’ve had the opportunity to step outside the pop rock world into the country world and into the Latin world and all this. I think that’s helped out my ideas. When we come together, I’m still a pop rock artist and we’re still a pop rock band, it’s just about trying to widen out that area and what that actually means. That gets me from “3 AM” to “Lonely No More.” They’re completely different, but they both make sense to me in my world.

MR: How do you feel about having sold like 30 million records worldwide?

RT: The way the music business changed since our first album, no one could see into the future and see where we were headed. I think the first record selling like 13 or 14 or whatever it was million really kind of bought us the opportunity to continue doing this and to build up. We stayed on the road for three years and went from clubs to arenas and got to build up a good live following. We didn’t realize how valuable that was going to be to us. I remember going through all of the Creeds and the Limp Bizkits and all of these bands that were the biggest things on the face of the Earth, they were on the cover of every magazine and they seemed like they had the world in the palm of their hands and then they just kind of seemed to not be there anymore. For us, I think we’d rather have a medium level of success and be there consistently than to be a supernova that just kind of burns out somewhere. We realized that there’s no amount of any previous success that guarantees any amount of future success. The only thing that you do is you start over every time and say, “This is our first record.” It has to excite us. We don’t worry about what anybody else is thinking. It just has to be something that we think we like and then we put it out and we cross our fingers and we go through a lot of TV shows.

MR: And get People’s Choice awards.

RT: Yeah, exactly. That’s what we hope for.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne