Cradlesong (2009)

Billboard (p.34)
- "[With] an impressive sonic span that includes everything from the Eastern-tinged 'Fire on the Mountain' to the countrified twang of the affectingly intimate 'Getting Late'..."

All Music Guide 7 of 10
Listening to cradlesong, the second album from Matchbox Twenty singer/songwriter Rob Thomas, it's hard not to think of him as a man out of time, making big music for a world of miniature niches. Thomas makes music as if it was the turn of the millennium, when there were cross-demographic radio formats and stores to goose sales to diamond status, traits that still serve him well when he's constructing sonic skyscrapers, even if the results don't necessarily feel at home in the modern skyline. With its urgent hooks and surging sincerity, cradlesong is recognizably Thomas' work, right down to its lower-case typography, but with the assistance of longtime producer Matt Serletic he's tweaked the formula of his 2005 solo debut Something to Be in judicious ways, using his worldbeat inflections as an underpinning instead of flair, something that ties the album together even when it lends the album a self-conscious sobriety that's a bit oppressive, despite Thomas' enveloping hooks. Still, those hooks go a long way toward opening up a somewhat hermetically sealed album, a record built on careful details in its productions and lyrics, a record constructed with discipline and eager to be taken seriously. This dogged sense of purpose does result in a tighter, better record than Something to Be and even it's not a lot of fun, it's not meant to be: it's big music about big issues, even inflating personal issues to the universal. If it seems somewhat out of step with its year, that almost makes Thomas' somber, determined craft admirable -- he's doing this not because it'll give him a hit but because he believes in it. - Stephen Thomas Erlewine
 

"I don't want to make the same record over and over again. I not only want to represent lyrically where I'm at as a person today, but stylistically I want to represent the time that I'm in. I'm 37, which is different than 30, and which is different than 25. It's a much different time in my life and I wanted the new record to reflect that. cradlesong doesn't sound like anything I've done before, and I think that's important."

Given Rob Thomas's stature as one of modern music's most compelling and commercially successful artists for well over a decade -- between Matchbox Twenty, his solo work, and his various collaborations with iconic artists like Santana and Mick Jagger, his tally now stands at more than 80 million albums sold worldwide -- it's easy to let the charts and numbers overshadow the essential reason he's come so far in the first place. As he says with typical understatement, "I'm a guy who hears songs in his head, and I have to write them down, and I have to get them out. I'm just lucky enough that I can make it my life's work."

Arguably the most accomplished singer/songwriter of his generation, for Rob it all comes back to the creative source. "I have to separate the idea of what I do for a living versus what I do. Songwriting is the only thing that makes sense to me. Years of doing it helps, but the truth is that the reason you do it for years is because it's what you do. It's the only thing that I have that kind of shorthand on...I don't know cars, I don't know sports, and I'm not a math whiz. This is something that I look at and it just makes sense to me."

Making sense of his musical inspiration is what Rob Thomas does at an exceptionally high level. "It's a two-part process -- there's inspiration and craft. The inspiration is the part that's completely magical and you have no responsibility over. The inspiration is when you're sitting in your car or in a room and you hear a melody. You love it, it sounds great, and then you realize that it doesn't exist yet in the world, that it's a melody you just came up with. That's a process that you can't be responsible for. The minute you start to claim ownership of it, you lose it. To paraphrase a quote from Quincy Jones, 'the moment that success leads you to say, "I'll take it from here, God," that's when God walks out of the room.'"

And as for the craft? "You have those moments when you are in full service of the feeling and you carry it as far as it takes you. And when that feeling stops, you put it away and at some point you have to go back and work on it. You say, 'OK, this is where the inspiration took me, now what was it I was trying to say, where was it I was going? It's this unbelievable process that when you're done with it, every time you do it, for a second you feel like the most unbelievably creative person in the world, and then it goes away and you feel like you're never going to do it again...and you have to start all over again. So you keep trying to get that feel, that high off of creating, that place that carries you from a blank page where nothing existed to a song that people are singing back to you at Madison Square Garden, if you're lucky. That's where the magic is."