Rob Thomas lives in upstate New York, in Westchester, about 30 minutes from the city.

It’s a heavily wooded area. Some mornings when he glances out of his living room he might see deer frisking on his front lawn.

He moved here in October 2001 after Matchbox Twenty pulled off the road after a lengthy world tour, and turned the basement into his music room.

He shares it with his wife of two years, Marisol Maldonado, a model with a business-marketing degree. Her name is tattooed on his left shoulder, above a Japanese symbol for loyalty. That same symbol is tattooed on her ankle.

“She actually thought I was a member of Stone Temple Pilots because she met me with Paul (drummer Doucette), and he looks like Scott Weiland,” Thomas chuckles.

“So when Scott made the front cover of the New York newspapers when he got busted, her mum rang her screaming!”

Actually, Rob reveals gleefully, his own background was worse and more troubled. Born on a military base in Germany, he spent much of his youth shuttling between his grandmother in South Carolina and his mum in Florida.

After dropping out of high school, the 17-year-old drifted around the south east, hitchhiking and crashing where he could. But singing was his saviour, and he settled in Orlando to work the band circuit.

“I did all sorts of day jobs so I could keep doing music. They had to be jobs you could leave in a minute so if you had a last minute gig on Friday night you could quit on the spot. Then on Monday you had to find a new job.

“I delivered beds, washed boats, did every job in a restaurant, was a roofer, a driver delivering futons, sewed women’s clothes. Each week you’d wonder if it was worth it.”

Soon enough, he teamed up with Doucette and bassist Brian Yale. The three recruited guitarist Adam Gaynor from his job at Miami’s Criteria Recording Studios and guitarist Kyle Cook from his studies at the Atlanta Institute of Music. Matchbox Twenty was born and success soon followed.

The finely tuned first album Yourself Or Someone Like You sold nine million copies worldwide and almost 600,000 in Australia. Mad Season was more of a mish-mash but also delivered the sales.

Last year, Thomas made $35 million from songwriting royalties alone, without adding what he made from record sales. These days, Rob talks about how he spends his off-time catching up with the latest films and computer games, and hangs out with local guys at barbecues.

Names like Mick, Carlos and Willie fall off his tongue. But they’re not your average ‘take a trip to the hardware store on a Saturday afternoon’ guys. He’s talking about Jagger, Santana and Nelson.

Santana, with whom he had a huge smash around the globe with ‘Smooth’ is like a big brother who has taught Thomas more about the right reasons for being a musician. Meanwhile, Willie Nelson is the man who pushed him into writing.

“He’s the greatest living American songwriter,” he says.

“It wasn’t enough for me to sing along with his records when I was a kid — I was wishing I had written them as well.”

Thomas teamed up with Jagger after the Rolling Stones congratulated him on the success of  ‘Smooth’. He and Jagger co-wrote the new Matchbox Twenty single ‘Disease’.

Another of the songs they hatched up, ‘Vision Of Paradise’ ended up on Jagger’s Goddess In The Doorway album. Thomas says he’s glad how things turned out. He wanted ‘Disease’ for his own band, and was relieved when Jagger told him he sang the song better and should keep it.

As far as singles go, ‘Disease’ is a corker. It sounds great on radio but without sounding like what you’d normally hear on an FM dial.

“We always knew it was the first single, but we did worry about it. I mean, there’s a  few seconds of silence at the start. What would radio make of that?”

The single opens the door to what the album More Than You Think You Are attempts to do. Their last one, Mad Season, went off the rails a bit. If someone suggested a song needed a 60-piece orchestra, it was used. Extravagance was the rule, not the exception.

This time around, they want to let the world know Matchbox Twenty are a good live band — the focus is on performing the songs.

Thomas says success has given the band the freedom to make their own mistakes.

But far from fail, he believes the new album is one of their best works.

“If it flopped, we’d be honestly astounded. But we wouldn’t say ‘if only we’d done it the other way…’.”
You can’t see that happening though. Matchbox Twenty are, above all, created from the staple of FM radio in the seventies, a continuation of the tradition of Elton John, Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty. The album swings between being radio friendly (‘All I Need’, ‘The Difference’) and stadium rock (‘Feel’).

When they return to Australia next year the fans are sure to go wild… complete with cigarette lighters, dutifully held above their heads, swinging from side to side.

Christie Eliezer