He would choose to be a chocolate cake with a gooey centre, he’d rather
be mauled by a shark than a crocodile, Tom Petty’s Square One has
“haunted [him] forever,” and he would find it “embarrassing and weird”
if you threw your underwear on the stage, but that hasn’t happened
since they were a “new alternative band.” But now he’s a bit older, and
if the knicker-throwing has stopped, the success certainly hasn’t, and
fame can’t be new to ROB THOMAS.
He’s the
lead singer of Grammy Award-winning group Matchbox Twenty and somewhere
around you’ve probably already seen the cover of Cradlesong;
a striking, intense image inspired by artist Louise Robinson that
Thomas likes, even if it is “a little scary.” (It is.) He was “going
for dark twisted fairytale,” and that’s what his second solo album is –
a collection of lullabies for a city that never sleeps, a world where
noise and rest have to mingle.
He writes pop/rock music and freely acknowledges
that he is “so mainstream,” but somehow, his lyrics get inside you and
resonate and his love of the twisted means none of his music is ever
that simple. He’s that combination of magic, talent, and human
fallibility that characterises artistic genius; he’s simultaneously the
guy that gets drunk with his mates, and the guy at a loss for words to
describe what it’s like to walk onstage in front of thousands. And he’s
somebody who truly believes in live performance.
“You have these certain songs for things happening
in your life, and then you run into people, and you meet people that
have been kinda allocated your song and then it’s all about a live
show. In real time, you and everybody in that room are on the same
page. They all have different reasons in their life why that song’s
important to them but you’re all there, sharing that moment and when we
have a great night, where everybody’s on the same page like that,
that’s the reason why we do it.”
So the magic and the mystery of music happens for
him, then, in “having that melody in [his] head… then one day sitting
down and listening to the record and then going out and playing it to
people who sing it back.” And after all this? He’s the guy using what
he’s listening to in order to keep track of how many drinks he’s had.
“The point in the night where you’re way too drunk
is the point when you wind up listening to yourself. So at some point
when we’re all hanging out, we’re on a bus leaving a gig and we’re all
really drunk, we’ll pull out the iPod, and we’re all listening to the
different stuff on it. We’re like, ‘oh play that, that time, that cover
we did,’ and so I tend to listen back to live stuff, but not much recorded stuff.”
You can catch Rob at the Royal Theatre early next year on Friday February 19. Tickets are available through Ticketek.
