Last week, for reasons I don't understand, I got "If You're Gone" by Matchbox 20 stuck in my head. I didn't know that was the name of the song when it got stuck in my head; I had to google it. I should have written down which couplet of lines got trapped in my brain. I think it was the pre-chorus:
And I think you're so mean, I think we should try
I think I could need, this in my life and
I think I'm scared, I think too much
I know it's wrong, it's a problem I'm dealin'
So I put the song on, and I thought, "Rob Thomas has the sexiest voice in the world??? Why aren't we talking about this all the time?" Then I remembered I have a newsletter where I can do anything I want, and now we're here.
When most people think of Rob Thomas, they think of "Smooth" by Santana featuring Rob Thomas, as they should. The song has turned into a meme, but it's also just objectively great. I remember my mom buying me the whole Santana album off the strength of that single (a thing people used to do in the '90s! My mom also bought me FanMail by TLC, then took it away when she decided the lyrics were inappropriate for a seven year old). Apparently Billboard considers "Smooth" the second most successful song of all time, which is an absurd sentence with no actual meaning, but it also feels deeply right.
"Smooth" is deeply sexy — I don't think that's controversial — but I think the part that sticks in people's minds is the guitar. Which it should! It's exceptional. But Rob Thomas takes the goofy lyrics (which he wrote), and just makes them....hot. "Man it's a hot one," he says, and you just wanna fan yourself for a second.
But mostly I want to talk about Matchbox 20, who released three massive albums in the late 90s and early 2000s, when I was a pre-preteen. Matchbox 20 songs are songs about not doing OK. "I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell," Rob sings on "Unwell." On "Bent," he croons:
Can you help me I'm bent?
I'm so scared that I'll never
Get put back together
Keep breaking me in
And this is how we will end
With you and me bent
It's hard to make this come across in words — you kind of just have to go put on a Rob Thomas song — but his voice is so sexy in a way that I don't think any currently popular male vocalist matches. He has a lovely little rasp, but he also has a pretty high range. It does things to me, still, to listen to his voice.
"If You're Gone" — the song that got stuck in my head last week — is a song not about Rob being fucked up, but about Rob being in love with a girl who's fucked up who he loves very much and he's begging to come home. "3AM" is about a similar woman — "she only sleeps when it's raining" and she has panic attacks in the middle of the night and needs Rob Thomas to comfort her.
When I listen to Matchbox 20 now, I think of myself as a kid, in the back of my mom's mini van, wondering what adulthood would be like. And it felt like Rob's voice was a road map. Adulthood would be hard ands messy and complicated, but it would also be kind of thrilling in how hard and messy it would be. All the adults I knew were like my parents — got married in their 20s, started to have kids in their 20s. As a kid I thought 26 was an incredibly old and mature age (maybe it was in the '90s), and I always thought I would ultimately follow the same path.
Matchbox 20's music was a hint that maybe people didn't have to follow the same path. My parents never stayed up until 3 A.M., but Rob Thomas did. Maybe I would too, one day.
When I think of "If You're Gone" and the Matchbox 20 discography I think of a genre of music that doesn't exist anymore: sad '90s and 2000s men singing about the fucked up women they love — who they love because they are fucked up. Hootie and The Blowfish's "Let Her Cry" is maybe the best of this genre ("She sits alone by a lamp post / Tryin' to find the thought that's escaped her mind" is such a good opening couplet). Train (pre-"Soul Sister") had "Meet Virginia": "She doesn't own a dress, her hair is always a mess / If you catch her stealin', she won't confess / She's beautiful." Rob Thomas hit the same ground again in one of his solo songs, "Her Diamonds," where her tears are like diamonds (not the best metaphor, but sure!).
The English language lyrics of "Livin' La Vida Loca" are also about this type of woman, minus any pretense of care about her psychological wellbeing: she drinks champagne, she dances naked in the rain, she's superstitious, she will drug you and rob you while you're sleeping?? (Nothing about the period from 1998 to 2006 was remotely OK). The latest song to consider to be part of this tradition was Jason Mraz's "Beautiful Mess," which was released in 2008 and was a huge obsession of high school Victoria.
Coldplay's "Fix You" is not about this woman, and I think it helps illustrate what is kind of fucked up about this genre of romantic songs about "crazy" girls. Chris Martin famously wrote "Fix You" for Gwyneth Paltrow, who he met just weeks after her father died. Maybe it is because my dad is dead, but this is possibly the most romantic concept in the world to me right now. "Fix You," because of its use in TV and movies (including a terrible inclusion in an episode of Glee, real gleeks know), has become a bit of a cliche, but if you consider the song without all the baggage that's been thrown on top of it (and Coldplay, and Gwyneth), it's startlingly beautiful. It's anthemic and moving. It's very sad but points to a better future, which we build together. It's about the hope that in the days and weeks and months and years ahead we might start to feel a little better. Chris Martin does not describe Gwyneth crying tear streaks into pillows, or putting on messy red lipstick and doing drugs. He doesn't talk about how it's actually romantic that she hasn't brushed her hair because she's too sad. He's not romanticizing the surface level part of grief and mental suffering. He's in it with her, walking beside her.
All this is to say that when I was a kid I wanted to be the girl with the messy mascara swinging from a lamp post and crying in Rob Thomas and/or Darius Rucker's lap, but now the idea of that woman makes me sad. She was a kind of musical manic pixie dream girl — fucked up enough that you want to have sex with her, but not the type of person you really fall in love with and want to try to stay with forever.
I don't want to be the girl at 3AM anymore. I want to be 2002 Gwyneth Paltrow (post Shakespeare in Love, pre-Goop).
But Matchbox 20 still slaps and everyone should listen to their music more! Get thee to Spotify.