Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas – HuffPost 7.30.12
Mike Ragogna: Rob, what advice do you have for new artists?
Rob Thomas: 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.