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The Songs Are Eclectic, Dark and (Hopefully) More Famous Than Him
By Alan Light
MSN Music
"I can talk about the craft of writing a song," says Rob Thomas. "Once you get the germ of an idea, where you go from that. But no one knows why you hear a melody in your head, and you always have to respect the weird, crazy magic that is. When Bruce Springsteen wrote 'Brilliant Disguise' or 'Devils & Dust ' -- it didn't exist, and then it did, and it has the power to change your molecules. That is an intangible, otherworldly thing."
Thomas knows a few things about songs that make an impact. In addition to the tens of millions of albums he has sold as the lead singer of Matchbox Twenty (including six No. 1 singles), he has collaborated with such legends as Mick Jagger, Willie Nelson and, of course, Santana -- for whom he wrote and sang the 1999 megasmash "Smooth," which sits at No. 2 in Billboard magazine's chart of the "Hot 100 All-Time Songs."
Now, Thomas is releasing "cradlesong," his second solo album. Though side projects by front men often head in a singer-songwriter direction, "cradlesong" displays an eclectic mix of styles, more uptempo and rocking than contemplative. As with some of Matchbox Twenty's biggest hits, though, the lyrics sometimes reveal the darker side of Thomas -- like the first single, "Her Diamonds," which addresses the battle the singer's wife is waging against an autoimmune disease. (The same day as the album's release, a DVD will also hit stores; titled "Something to Be Tour: Live at Red Rocks," the 18-song set was originally filmed for the PBS series Soundstage.)
Related: See photos | Watch "Her Diamonds"
In conversation over the phone, though, 37-year-old Thomas discussed the reasons he sees the diversity of "cradlesong" as a strength rather than a liability, while conceding that it does sometimes makes life more difficult in the worlds of radio and promotion. In the end, despite all of his success as a performer, he maintains that he wants to be remembered as a songwriter. "I want to be a musician," says Thomas, "whose songs are more famous than I am."
Alan Light: When you sit down to write, do you know whether you're working on a Matchbox Twenty song or a Rob Thomas song?
Rob Thomas: With Matchbox it's easy, because I'm not the only one making the decisions. On the last set of songs, the new material we did for the greatest-hits collection (2007's "Exile on Mainstream"), we all started writing together for the first time, so now I feel like we don't really have to worry about Matchbox world until we all get together. Then we sit down, have a few beers, and play each other the stuff we've been working on.
As we all get older, it gets harder to leave our families for a year and a half to promote a record, so anything we do really has to be something that we all feel really connected to. I brought "Her Diamonds" to them, and they loved it, but they said it sounded like it was really for a solo album.
You used a very different process writing for "cradlesong" than you've ever used before.
I had a studio in my house for the first time. Normally, you finish a song, or almost finish it, and then you bring that into the studio and work it out with the musicians, and try to describe what you're hearing, what moods or whatever. This time, I could just make my own track -- start with the drums, the bass line, and build it up, get the vibe of the track and start listening to it and singing over that. Songs were really born in the studio. Now I have to figure out how to even play them on an acoustic guitar to play them live. But I didn't have to explain anything; I could just play a song for the other musicians and then get them to play it better.
The album has an upbeat, pop-rock, '80s kind of vibe, and I don't think I would have done as much of that if the drums hadn't been involved at the writing stage. Usually when you write on an acoustic guitar, you kinda write sad, meandering songs, and then you try to find a pulse in those. So I think this time, there are less laid-back, acoustic-y songs than I usually have.
The album does have an upbeat feel, but there's still quite a bit of heavier subject matter on here.
Well, "Her Diamonds" is about my wife living with an immunity disease, but it's really about living with any situation like that, having empathy in a difficult situation that's important to you. A lot of the songs are about relationships -- not just love songs, but relationships between people.
But people hear different things in my songs, anyway. I've met people who told me they used "Push" as their wedding song! I guess they never listened to the words, so it might sound more lighthearted than the lyrics actually are.
I do want to have hopeful outcomes in my songs, though, no matter how deep my depression when I wrote them, so maybe that's what comes out in the production at the end. There's only two songs about death on this album, so I guess that's pretty good.
Was there any one song that defined this project, or where it all came into focus for you?
I've been writing over a year-and-a-half, two-year period. When I did "Diamonds," I loved that percussion vibe from (Paul Simon's) "Rhythm of the Saints," and I thought maybe that's what the album would sound like. But all of the songs I was writing weren't that kind of song. So then you have to make a decision -- to not use songs you really love that don't fit, or to try to make the songs fit this arbitrary vibe.
I hate getting four or five songs into a record and feeling like you're hearing the same songs over and over, anyway. I think each song needed to be considered individually, whatever each song wanted to be. "Snowblind" has a full-on John Hughes, '80s vibe; "Getting Late" is more country-ish. So the personality of the album became whatever that journey was -- it was almost more like putting a show together.
What do you take away from having the opportunity to work with legends like Mick Jagger or Willie Nelson?
It's invaluable, but it's intangible. I have a hard time explaining what it is. Watching Mick Jagger write a song, seeing his process from soup to nuts, you see the similarities and you learn from that, or the totally different ways he does things. Seeing other people do that, I don't think there's any other way you can learn.
I listened to country music my whole life, but I couldn't write a real country song. Then I sat down and wrote with Phil Vassar and within minutes, he was using chords I know, but putting them together in ways I never would have come up with, and I was like, "Oh, that's how you do it."
On the first Matchbox album, those were the best songs I could write, but a lot of them sounded the same, because my idea of a song was very small. The people I've worked with, the choices I've made, are all about expanding what the idea of a song is to me -- what that possible song, that blank page, could become.
Isn't there also the risk of getting in your own way if you start insisting on using diverse styles all the time?
Yeah, that's true; you might wind up denying yourself what might be a creative moment because you're worrying about the outcome of a song. When you sit down, you just have to let the song be what it will be. Which also means you have to write a lot of bad songs. I have a lot of songs that will never see the light of day. Or I'll play a song for my wife and she'll say, "That sounds like it could be a hit," but I'll think, yeah, but it's a hit that I already wrote.
Guys like Sufjan Stevens, Josh Rouse -- they completely change hats every record. Even U2 has a tendency to do that. So there are bands that mix things up way better than I do. But it's definitely something I'm trying for.
Related: See photos | Watch "Her
Diamonds"
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Alan Light is the former editor-in-chief of Spin, Vibe and Tracks magazines and a former senior writer at Rolling Stone. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, GQ and Entertainment Weekly. His book "The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys" was published in 2006. Alan is a two-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music writing.
