Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to Bob West's podcast. My guest
Speaker 1: today is one and only Rob top Rob. You're wearing
Speaker 1: a Bob Dylan T shirt. You're a big Dylan fan.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, of course. Man, if you're a songwriter and
Speaker 2: you're not, then you've missed something along the way.
Speaker 1: So what are your favorite Dylan songs?
Speaker 2: You know, besides I think obviously you know, like Blowing
Speaker 2: in the Wind or that kind of seminal first period,
Speaker 2: you know, Like I was really really got into the
Speaker 2: Times of Change record, you know, like the Yeah, I
Speaker 2: thought that there was a really great return to form.
Speaker 2: I thought it was just it was it was kind
Speaker 2: of unique for me to like find something that you know,
Speaker 2: like I don't when you stumble on something new, you
Speaker 2: stumble on something and when you have something that you
Speaker 2: grew up with, you kind of always just love the
Speaker 2: things that you loved about them to begin with, you know.
Speaker 2: But I find that there was certain artist Springsteen being
Speaker 2: one of those, like when he went on that unbelievably
Speaker 2: prolific tear you know, after nine to eleven from the
Speaker 2: Rising on, like, you know, it's kind of great when
Speaker 2: you when you see that happen and you realize that
Speaker 2: you're just as excited about the new stuff as you
Speaker 2: were about some of the older stuff. Now I've seen
Speaker 2: him live and it's not my favorite thing in the world.
Speaker 1: I got all said, I'm the same way, so uh,
Speaker 1: I won't go anymore. But uh okay, believe it at that.
Speaker 1: So do you keep up on new music?
Speaker 2: Not in the way that I used to. I mean,
Speaker 2: I it's easy to blame the medium, but I think,
Speaker 2: you know, like I do a song of the day
Speaker 2: every day, and so in a way that that tasked
Speaker 2: me to every day search on Spotify and listen till
Speaker 2: I find something either that you know or I mean,
Speaker 2: I try and do it, like if I'm driving in
Speaker 2: the car and something excites me and make a note
Speaker 2: for that to be my song of the day. But
Speaker 2: I don't. I mean, I can't remember the last time
Speaker 2: that I got excited about a brand new album and
Speaker 2: wore that record out like I used to do, you
Speaker 2: know where I like, actually listen to something, seek out
Speaker 2: the record and play it from beginning to end, over
Speaker 2: and over and over. I think I've just become a
Speaker 2: victim to streaming, and I've become a victim to song
Speaker 2: by song by song. You know, I now like my
Speaker 2: music like I like my people. It's just on a
Speaker 2: case by case, song by song base.
Speaker 1: So how do you get turned on to new stuff?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, it's not as important to me, I guess,
Speaker 2: to get turned on the new stuff, I think. I
Speaker 2: just you know, I'm a big fan of film, a
Speaker 2: big fan of television. I think that placement now has
Speaker 2: been better than it's ever been before. So I know
Speaker 2: that I find a lot of music that I love
Speaker 2: through film and through television. It just just in different,
Speaker 2: you know, in sync situations like the amount of times
Speaker 2: and my wife and I are sitting on the couch
Speaker 2: watching something and then we hold up our with a
Speaker 2: SoundHound and we both do it at the same time. Like,
Speaker 2: but what is that that happened? That happens quite a bit,
Speaker 2: I think, you know, as you I've read an article
Speaker 2: somewhere that said that, you know, and I don't know
Speaker 2: if it was like thirty or forty, but there's a
Speaker 2: certain point in your getting older where you stop like
Speaker 2: really taking in new things in that you know, like
Speaker 2: you there's a certain point where culturally you like what
Speaker 2: you liked up until this point, and that's the kind
Speaker 2: of thing that always really excites you, and not that
Speaker 2: a couple of them don't get in, but it I
Speaker 2: don't retain it in that way, Like like I remember
Speaker 2: there's a band called The Beaches, and I keep forgetting
Speaker 2: like until I see them, and I'm like, oh, that's right,
Speaker 2: I love the Beaches. I need to go check out
Speaker 2: that record. And I never fucking check out that record.
Speaker 2: I just keep telling them my isealf, Oh I got
Speaker 2: to go check out that record. But I probably know
Speaker 2: like four songs, but I'm like, oh, I'm a fan
Speaker 2: of the Beaches, which means I'm a fan of those
Speaker 2: four songs.
Speaker 1: Okay, But you know the difference, it's very different when
Speaker 1: you were coming up and you had your initial success.
Speaker 1: Today there's a tsunami of prout, like it's almost you know,
Speaker 1: every day there's one hundred thousand tracks on Spotify, And
Speaker 1: I know the bit you're talking about age, but it's
Speaker 1: like incomprehensible. But let's go back a step. So what
Speaker 1: streaming television do you watch?
Speaker 2: Oh, I mean it's purely script scripted drama, comedy. You know,
Speaker 2: Like I'm just a huge fan of pretty much any
Speaker 2: new thing that comes out my wife and I are,
Speaker 2: you know, Like my favorite thing now is just when
Speaker 2: she tells me that she doesn't want to watch something
Speaker 2: because I'm running out of shit for myself to watch alone.
Speaker 2: So like she doesn't like something, I'm like, oh, thank god,
Speaker 2: I got something, you know, to watch when I'm working
Speaker 2: out or something to watch when I'm alone. But I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm a try I'll watch anything except for reality TV,
Speaker 2: Like I can't do anything. Like I'm just not a
Speaker 2: big fan of reality TV, And oddly I'm not really
Speaker 2: all my friends are big fans of biopicks. I'm more
Speaker 2: of a fan of like like retail you know, I
Speaker 2: really appreciate those a lot more. But I'm not as
Speaker 2: big a fan of documentaries as I used to be.
Speaker 2: Not really sure why. I just find that when I
Speaker 2: see them, I'm incredibly turned on by them, and I
Speaker 2: really love them, But I just don't get myself motivated
Speaker 2: to like sit down and go I've got two hours.
Speaker 2: I want to watch this, you know. But then like
Speaker 2: my wife and I watched that I forget the name
Speaker 2: of it, but that that documentary about the volcano, you know,
Speaker 2: the studio that was just under the volcano. And like
Speaker 2: that brought back such a flood of memories because you know,
Speaker 2: we were we came out of this era after that era,
Speaker 2: you know, I mean they weren't throwing that much money,
Speaker 2: but they were still throwing money at us. So like
Speaker 2: we could still make a record and that could mean
Speaker 2: renting out the entire top floor of the Hit Factory
Speaker 2: and some of the bottom floor and have like a
Speaker 2: factory going just for your album, making that record and
Speaker 2: you know, travel away somewhere to get away for an
Speaker 2: experience to make a record, like and be able to
Speaker 2: do that and not realizing that we might be one
Speaker 2: of the last kind of musical generations that gets to
Speaker 2: experience making music in that way. So when I saw that,
Speaker 2: I was like, ah, maybe I don't like Maybe I
Speaker 2: don't like seeing myself in these documentaries. You know, maybe
Speaker 2: I maybe it's just too much longing. Sometimes I'm not
Speaker 2: a competitive person, but I think creatively i'm competitive. So
Speaker 2: I think sometimes I see somebody and they're just so
Speaker 2: fucking talented that it just makes me feel immediately less. So,
Speaker 2: you know, and so I think that sometimes I have
Speaker 2: a hard time. I just kind of want to be
Speaker 2: in my own lane doing my thing and be inspired
Speaker 2: by somebody else's art.
Speaker 1: Okay, there are other people you might feel inadequate relative to.
Speaker 1: But how much of it is what you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: that the business has changed and you don't get all
Speaker 1: that money thrown it at you. And is it lamenting
Speaker 1: those days or is it just when you see somebody
Speaker 1: say they're fucking great?
Speaker 2: Yeah? No, I mean, you know, I was really fortunate
Speaker 2: in the career, especially at the very beginning, that really
Speaker 2: bought me the ticket to be on the ride for
Speaker 2: as long as I've been on it. But it's never
Speaker 2: I mean, coming up, we were we were very very
Speaker 2: careful about decisions that we made in things that we
Speaker 2: wanted to do, and we've left a lot of money
Speaker 2: on the table. It's never really been the deciding motivating factor.
Speaker 2: I just when I hear a great like when I
Speaker 2: hear a great song, I get I go through this
Speaker 2: whole problem and my wife can see it happening in
Speaker 2: my eyes and she's just like, ah, fuck, not again.
Speaker 2: Like I'll go through a whole process and luckily it
Speaker 2: usually ends with me creating something, but it starts with
Speaker 2: this feeling of like how does he do that? Like
Speaker 2: I'm still amazed at how I can listen to a
Speaker 2: new song and when I break it down, eventually I
Speaker 2: see it. I see it. I see there's a verse,
Speaker 2: and I see there's a chorus, and I know the chords,
Speaker 2: and I see the makeup of it. And it's not magic.
Speaker 2: But I love the fact that when I first hear it,
Speaker 2: it sounds like voodoo. It sounds like something that I
Speaker 2: don't know, and it's realize it's because I understand the
Speaker 2: mechanics of something very very well, but still didn't see
Speaker 2: how they got there. It's like if I were a
Speaker 2: magician going to see a really great magician and still
Speaker 2: getting fooled by the trick. And that's what it feels
Speaker 2: like sometimes when I hear something and I just go, oh,
Speaker 2: I've never been a good magician. I'm still fucking pulling
Speaker 2: rabbits out of a hat over here, you know, I'm
Speaker 2: still doing my verse in my chorus, and they're doing
Speaker 2: something amazing over here. You know.
Speaker 1: Can you give us any concrete examples of songs?
Speaker 2: I mean, that's probably not. I mean, I'm the worst.
Speaker 2: I feel like I feel like Nick Hornby and in
Speaker 2: a high fidelity where like I'm tasked to put down
Speaker 2: the top five list, and it never, like nothing ever
Speaker 2: comes to mind as soon as you know, as soon
Speaker 2: as I.
Speaker 1: Hate that too, but it's just you know, you hear
Speaker 1: certain songs sometimes that as a memory. Okay, So if
Speaker 1: you're not watching biopics or you're watching series, or you're
Speaker 1: watching movies.
Speaker 2: I'm watching both. I don't know. I think we've all
Speaker 2: we all got to a certain place where it feels
Speaker 2: like a momentous task to sit down and watch an
Speaker 2: hour and a half or two hour film, but we'll
Speaker 2: stream four hours of five hours of something without thinking
Speaker 2: twice about it. Like I I've actually caught myself now
Speaker 2: on the other side of it, like watching a movie
Speaker 2: and going, you know, that movie was pretty good, but
Speaker 2: it would have been better if it had been a series,
Speaker 2: Like they really could have got in there, they really
Speaker 2: could have dug into it. So like I'm and I'm
Speaker 2: still I'm so it's there's so much that I've got
Speaker 2: a sticky note that my wife and I refer to
Speaker 2: of like Okay, let's see where we're at, Like what
Speaker 2: you know, what are we watching right now? Like I
Speaker 2: think right now it's all about dark matter on HBO,
Speaker 2: which is on Max I guess, which is fucking phenomenal.
Speaker 2: And uh, but then we just went through and just
Speaker 2: went back were watching all of the Star Wars movies again,
Speaker 2: like or at least the main nine, right, And because
Speaker 2: my wife was so down on the prequels for so long,
Speaker 2: and I keep trying to explain to her that maybe
Speaker 2: there's shit, there's an argument to be had about the
Speaker 2: actual movies themselves, and are they overseegied and underacted or
Speaker 2: overacted maybe, but the story is so similar to everything
Speaker 2: else that comes after it that going back now watching
Speaker 2: those prequels, like, she got emotional at the end of it,
Speaker 2: because these are characters that are part of our life,
Speaker 2: you know, and so that's been a fun thing for
Speaker 2: us to do.
Speaker 1: Okay, what's the best Star Wars movie?
Speaker 2: Let me think, I mean, for me, it's got to
Speaker 2: be a new Hope. But I mean, I think that's
Speaker 2: just because it was the thing that everything hinged on,
Speaker 2: you know, like it comes with so much emotional baggage
Speaker 2: with it that and it just means so much. I mean,
Speaker 2: all the way to my fucking Star Wars bed sheets
Speaker 2: that I had, you know, probably way past the ages
Speaker 2: that I should have had Star Wars bedsheets.
Speaker 1: Okay, Star Wars came out in seventy seven, you were
Speaker 1: a little kid. Did you see it when it came out.
Speaker 2: I don't think so. My wife and I were trying it.
Speaker 2: We don't remember when we first saw Star Wars, and
Speaker 2: we were having that exact conversation. I remember my sister
Speaker 2: and I were growing up in South Carolina. My sister
Speaker 2: has we have different fathers, and I remember her father
Speaker 2: picking her up, she's five years older, and her father
Speaker 2: picking her up to go see Star Wars in the
Speaker 2: theater and being like like crying. My mother had to
Speaker 2: console me because I couldn't go. And I remember that succinctly,
Speaker 2: But I don't remember when I first saw I remember
Speaker 2: going to see Empire Strikes Back, and I remember going
Speaker 2: to see Jedi, and I think even more, I remember
Speaker 2: leaving the theater after those movies and you're walking out
Speaker 2: and the credits are playing, and they're playing that iconic score,
Speaker 2: that John Williams score, and you're a kid, and you
Speaker 2: walk down the aisle of the theater to leave feeling
Speaker 2: like a fucking Jedi, you know, like there was just
Speaker 2: it was it was it stayed with you in such
Speaker 2: a way. And uh, I've honestly, in everything that I do,
Speaker 2: have tried to find a way to maintain that, you know,
Speaker 2: Like how do I try and stay time? Like how
Speaker 2: do I take away the cynicism that comes with age
Speaker 2: and knowing things and just kind of give yourself over
Speaker 2: to what it's supposed to be. And I mean I
Speaker 2: fail at it miserably, but God, that was the best
Speaker 2: feeling ever.
Speaker 1: So what else is on the list.
Speaker 2: Of all time? Like, I mean, it jumps around my
Speaker 2: One of my favorite movies of all time is iHeart
Speaker 2: Huckabees David Russell film, But also so is Curproco. I mean,
Speaker 2: like my wife every time she comes in the house,
Speaker 2: if Circac goes on, it's fucking on, and it stays on.
Speaker 2: It drives her insane and then she just gets some
Speaker 2: out of my like shitty Patino And personally you get
Speaker 2: too in the back, You get to in the back,
Speaker 2: like I mean, it's it's just it was, It's just
Speaker 2: I don't know if there's anything cooler in the world
Speaker 2: than al Pacino during Cercroco period. You know, it's a
Speaker 2: maybe dog day afternoon, okay.
Speaker 1: But on the list that you have what you're gonna
Speaker 1: watch on television? How do you establish that list?
Speaker 2: Hold on, you know what I'm gonna show, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: figure out right now, like right now, so I've even
Speaker 2: got it. So I've even got it down. And the
Speaker 2: ones that that are gone away, but but they're gonna
Speaker 2: come back, things like The Morning Show and the Umbrella Academy, Uh, Fargo,
Speaker 2: if they're gonna if that's gonna come back, Deadlock which
Speaker 2: is really great. Australian showed Showgun, which I think is
Speaker 2: kind of done. It's not coming back. Fallout was really great.
Speaker 2: But I mean then we'll watch like Abbod Elementary and
Speaker 2: Welcome to Wrexham. I just started. We just started with
Speaker 2: The Big Cigar, which I think is pretty great. So,
Speaker 2: I mean it's pretty all over the place. I don't
Speaker 2: think we adhere to like, you know, any one kind
Speaker 2: of thing.
Speaker 1: And so what will your wife not watch that you
Speaker 1: watch yourself?
Speaker 2: Okay, well, like we just started The Sympathizer with with
Speaker 2: Robert Downey Jr. And she watched one episode and was like, okay,
Speaker 2: this is yours. I don't know why she loves Robert
Speaker 2: Downey Junior more than me, but that was it.
Speaker 1: So is this something where you watch something every night
Speaker 1: or once a week or how much?
Speaker 2: No, pretty much every night. I mean every night that
Speaker 2: we're home. You know, we're we have we we have
Speaker 2: the blessing and the curse. Like if I'm gone, I'm gone.
Speaker 2: But when I'm home, I'm I'm very present. And when
Speaker 2: we have long stretches of time where we're you know,
Speaker 2: so we have a routine, and that routine always involves
Speaker 2: let's either make some dinner or have some dinner. We're
Speaker 2: gonna sit down and we're gonna watch something, you know,
Speaker 2: something that we're really into. And then on the weekends,
Speaker 2: this movie time is using when we set aside time
Speaker 2: to actually watch films.
Speaker 1: But you always do it at home. You don't go
Speaker 1: out to the theater.
Speaker 2: Not as much. We you know, here, we live in Bedford,
Speaker 2: and right around the corner in Bedford Village there's this
Speaker 2: beautiful place called the Bedford it's a Bedford Cinema, but
Speaker 2: it's also the Clive Davis Center for Performing Arts.
Speaker 1: This is bed for New York in the Bedford.
Speaker 2: New York right right, And they have this beautiful place,
Speaker 2: you know, and you can eat food there and it's great.
Speaker 2: You know, it's wine and food and they have directors
Speaker 2: come and they have like events centered around the films.
Speaker 2: But they'll also have classic movies Tuesdays and Thursdays, like
Speaker 2: they just had the Big Chill last week. I think
Speaker 2: they have escaped from New York coming up next week,
Speaker 2: and so we're more likely to go see those movies.
Speaker 2: But like, I mean, there's a line of like, you know,
Speaker 2: when the new Batman movie comes out, I got to
Speaker 2: see that in a theater. When you know, there's certain
Speaker 2: movies that the director all the time and effort that
Speaker 2: goes into making it the spectacle that it is, deserves
Speaker 2: that kind of format. I just don't need it for
Speaker 2: a lot of the small independent films that I'm watching,
Speaker 2: they'll they'll be fine at home, you know. And also
Speaker 2: I just I'm good and old man. I just it
Speaker 2: takes a lot for me to get I joked that,
Speaker 2: you know, I moved to Bedford from the city, and
Speaker 2: I didn't want to move too far because I was like,
Speaker 2: you know, I want to be able to go in
Speaker 2: out of the city all the time because I'm you know,
Speaker 2: that's me man. I'm a social butterfly, and like I
Speaker 2: joke now that it's It's like if John Lennon and
Speaker 2: Jesus were playing at the Beacon, I would still need
Speaker 2: to make sure, like, well, I mean, am I getting
Speaker 2: driven in? Do I have to find parking? Like? Do I?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: Do I am I good? You know? Do I have
Speaker 2: good tickets? Like? I don't know?
Speaker 1: But if they're playing at the Capitol, you'll go.
Speaker 2: Oh the Capitol for sure. I mean that place is awesome.
Speaker 2: I was playing the Capitol and in the dressing room,
Speaker 2: the artist dressing room, there's a picture, live picture of
Speaker 2: Carlos back in like the early seventies, like sixties playing
Speaker 2: and I sent him the picture and he remembered it immediately,
Speaker 2: remember that tour. He remember that show, and he's like, oh,
Speaker 2: the Capitol. He didn't even know it was. He didn't
Speaker 2: know it was back open again.
Speaker 1: So a lot of great shows there before it closed
Speaker 1: and Peter Shapiro reopened it. But you grew up in
Speaker 1: the South. What's it like living in the North.
Speaker 2: Now, Well, I've been here longer than I've been anywhere,
Speaker 2: because I've been here. I'm fifty two and I've been
Speaker 2: here for twenty six years. In New York so I've like,
Speaker 2: I don't really know remember, but I think that the
Speaker 2: difference is you're never not from the South, if that
Speaker 2: makes sense. Like there are certain sensibilities that I grew
Speaker 2: up with and I have because I had a Southern mother,
Speaker 2: because I grew up in the South, and those things
Speaker 2: don't change, and I find there's a yokeleness around me
Speaker 2: in that, like like when I go to a party
Speaker 2: or I go somewhere like you know, and I'm I
Speaker 2: go to some you know, great premiere and you go
Speaker 2: to the after party and it's very swanky and it's
Speaker 2: a lot of very fanous, but I'm actually like, I'm
Speaker 2: really glad to meet you, and I'm really glad to
Speaker 2: be there, And that comes across, as you know, as
Speaker 2: kind of like yogel, for lack of a better word,
Speaker 2: very and very uncool. But I think so you like,
Speaker 2: I don't remember what it's like to be in the South,
Speaker 2: and I'm sure it's much different twenty six years later
Speaker 2: than it was then, some some better and some worse.
Speaker 2: But uh, but I but I'll never forget what it's
Speaker 2: like to be from the South. And as soon as
Speaker 2: I go back home and I get a little buzz
Speaker 2: on the accents keeps back out because when my wife
Speaker 2: first met me, it was thick. I mean it was like,
Speaker 2: you know, not big. I was like, you know, had
Speaker 2: it really deep and uh and she loved it because
Speaker 2: she was a girl from New York. She didn't you know,
Speaker 2: didn't really spend a lot of time with Southern guys.
Speaker 2: So I think it helped took her in. But eventually
Speaker 2: it went away also because I hated it kept I
Speaker 2: hated that it came through in my singing voice, like
Speaker 2: my first record, all deeply in the first record, a
Speaker 2: little bit in the second record, everything had the Southern
Speaker 2: twinge to it. You know, it was cold house harm
Speaker 2: mariink like. It was just it was this southernness that
Speaker 2: was in there, and I like, I don't know how
Speaker 2: to be someone else. So it took, you know, years
Speaker 2: of traveling around the world and being in New York
Speaker 2: and living there for it to kind of work its
Speaker 2: way out. I guess into like whatever my accent is now,
Speaker 2: which is just kind of like a non specific Northeastern
Speaker 2: kind of a thing.
Speaker 1: So you didn't consciously try to get rid of it,
Speaker 1: It just evolved.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I don't think I could have. If
Speaker 2: you listen record by record, you can hear it fading away,
Speaker 2: you know, little by little.
Speaker 1: So how'd you meet your wife.
Speaker 2: At a strip club? No, she was. She was on vacation
Speaker 2: in Montreal with a friend. She had never heard of
Speaker 2: our band, but her we only had one song out.
Speaker 2: So we had the joke between us that when we met,
Speaker 2: I was more famous than she thought that I was,
Speaker 2: but less famous than I thought that I was. And
Speaker 2: because to her, she was this worldly New Yorker who
Speaker 2: had lived, she'd modeled all over the world. She'd seen
Speaker 2: things that I can only imagine. And to her, I
Speaker 2: was this guy who had a song on the radio.
Speaker 2: She was like, big fucking deal. And to me, I
Speaker 2: was this guy that had a song on the fucking radio.
Speaker 2: It was a big fucking deal. And so she showed
Speaker 2: up that I was immediately her friend somehow.
Speaker 1: A little bit slower. Where were you? How did you
Speaker 1: end up really encountering her?
Speaker 2: I met the Metropolis, this kind of like larger sized club,
Speaker 2: smaller sized theater in Montreal. Her friend, what I want
Speaker 2: to say, was kind of like being very flirty with
Speaker 2: our guitar tech. And so the guitar tech brought her
Speaker 2: back after the show, and so whor my now wife
Speaker 2: was in tow they're just upset, like she wanted to
Speaker 2: fucking go because, in her words, girls like her don't
Speaker 2: hang out after the shows. And we've always known that, Bob,
Speaker 2: you know, like we've always you always notice that, like
Speaker 2: there are a lot of hot girls at shows, but
Speaker 2: they're not hanging out backstage because when the show's over,
Speaker 2: they go do hot girl shit. They've got us to do.
Speaker 2: And so my wife didn't want to be there. She
Speaker 2: was there begrudgingly, and then I was also I was
Speaker 2: about thirty or more pounds heavier than I am now.
Speaker 2: If you listen to her, I only had one eyebrow,
Speaker 2: my teeth are a little fucked up. And she's like,
Speaker 2: I don't know why. She's like, I just saw you
Speaker 2: and thought I see something in there, And I walked
Speaker 2: over and just said hi to her and managed to
Speaker 2: get her phone number and then left. We only talked
Speaker 2: for like maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and then like
Speaker 2: four days later, I went to Europe for like two weeks,
Speaker 2: and so I just spent that whole time talking to
Speaker 2: her on the phone, like she was going to college
Speaker 2: at the time, so we would just go, like, you know,
Speaker 2: whenever her late night and my after show, I'd go
Speaker 2: straight back to Hotell me. We just talk on the phone,
Speaker 2: so that by the time I got back and she
Speaker 2: came to a festival, I had her fly on to
Speaker 2: a festival in Boston, which like the first thing that
Speaker 2: we did when we came back. And she came to
Speaker 2: that show, and we felt like we really knew each
Speaker 2: other because we had spent hours and hours talking about
Speaker 2: our lives and everything, and so I was like, I
Speaker 2: even told her, like on the first date that we
Speaker 2: were going to get married. I was like, we watched
Speaker 2: one of my other favorite movies, Basquiot, the Julian Schebel movie,
Speaker 2: and there's a song, the version of the Nearness of
Speaker 2: You by Keith Richards is in there, and I said, oh,
Speaker 2: this is the song you're gonna walk down the aisle
Speaker 2: when we get married. And she didn't run, and so
Speaker 2: I knew that was a good sign. And so now
Speaker 2: this year will be our twenty fifth wedding.
Speaker 1: Average Okay, was it smooth off into the sunset or
Speaker 1: were there bumps in the road.
Speaker 2: I think overall pretty smooth, and that we're really good friends.
Speaker 2: I don't. I mean, the thing about being married that
Speaker 2: long is is just that everybody at you know, every
Speaker 2: few years you're evolving into whatever it is that you're
Speaker 2: going to become. And so I think every I would
Speaker 2: give it, let's say every five years, you chick it
Speaker 2: on yourself, and whatever group of experiences that you've had
Speaker 2: happened to you or that you've been a part of,
Speaker 2: they change you in some way and you start to become,
Speaker 2: you know, eventually whoever you are. And to do that
Speaker 2: with another human being isn't necessarily the most natural thing
Speaker 2: in the world. It doesn't always work out that way.
Speaker 2: These two people go on these different paths sometimes and
Speaker 2: they verge, you know, tremendously, and they wind up just
Speaker 2: not recognizing each other anymore. And I think her and
Speaker 2: I have stayed friends, and that's been the main thing.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm from the South and she is Puerto
Speaker 2: Rican and Spanish. So we've had fucking fights. I mean
Speaker 2: we were we were in Detroit and got into a fight.
Speaker 2: It was like right before Christmas. I remember, because it
Speaker 2: was right She as like it was like ten minutes
Speaker 2: before the show, and she's like, get I want you
Speaker 2: to get your ship and get off the bus. Just
Speaker 2: get your ship and get off the bus. And I
Speaker 2: took my suitcase or whatever, and I got off the
Speaker 2: bus and I'm just like, you know, this will blow over.
Speaker 2: And I played the show. And as I'm walking back,
Speaker 2: I go to the backstage door and I could I
Speaker 2: go to the woman working, I can you do me
Speaker 2: a favorite? Can you look outside and just tell me
Speaker 2: as they're a big black bus right by the door,
Speaker 2: And she's called, no, no, that bus left. It left about
Speaker 2: two hours ago, and so she she takes she takes
Speaker 2: the bus, and I've still got two weeks on tour
Speaker 2: to go down south, so I have to like jump
Speaker 2: on the band bus for two weeks. But then by
Speaker 2: the next day, her and my bus driver are here
Speaker 2: at my house, like write to me sweet messages because
Speaker 2: they're gonna go out and they're gonna go buy Christmas
Speaker 2: trees and like you're all excited. And I was just like,
Speaker 2: I think she just wanted to go home. I don't
Speaker 2: even know if she was mad at me. And I
Speaker 2: find that one of the things about being married as
Speaker 2: long as we are, as we can be in the
Speaker 2: middle of a crazy fight and then something could come
Speaker 2: on the TV and I could be ho pause out
Speaker 2: and she'd be like, oh my god, we'll go and
Speaker 2: we'll we're laughing, and then we'll go okay, okay, fight
Speaker 2: back on, go go.
Speaker 1: Have you ever been to couples counseling?
Speaker 2: No, No, that's not for us.
Speaker 1: And the two of you don't have children together, right,
Speaker 1: we don't.
Speaker 2: I have a son. My son is twenty six. So
Speaker 2: that was another hurdle is that, you know, so we
Speaker 2: meet each other, she's in love, she's got this whole
Speaker 2: vision of this life that we're gonna have together, and
Speaker 2: I have to explain to her that I do have
Speaker 2: a son on the way that he's you know, he
Speaker 2: hasn't been born yet, he's about to be born in July.
Speaker 2: And that was I think. In fact, so I had
Speaker 2: a song on my second record, Matchbok second record called
Speaker 2: if You're Gone, and I wrote that song to night
Speaker 2: my son was born, because that night my wife broke
Speaker 2: up with me. My girl up she was my girlfriend
Speaker 2: at the time, and broke up with me because it
Speaker 2: just it seemed too much for her, this idea that
Speaker 2: she was in love with this guy, but he was
Speaker 2: about to embark on this other journey that she wasn't
Speaker 2: a part of and something that was very important to her,
Speaker 2: the idea of having kids and the idea of being married,
Speaker 2: and so she didn't know. She thought maybe I already
Speaker 2: had this and didn't need her for it, and she
Speaker 2: broke up, and then I wrote, if you're gone. I
Speaker 2: don't think that's what got her back, but that was
Speaker 2: kind of the headspace that I was in at the time.
Speaker 2: And then you know, I think her she's had myriad
Speaker 2: health issues for the last twenty some odd years and
Speaker 2: because of those things, it just wasn't in the in
Speaker 2: the cards for us. And we're okay with it, Like
Speaker 2: we were never people who were going to be defined
Speaker 2: by being parents, and we are people who do it
Speaker 2: like our time that we have, you know, so we're
Speaker 2: never like all the pitter patter of little feet and
Speaker 2: her and my son are super close, and you know,
Speaker 2: my son is now my son is now the guitar
Speaker 2: player in my solo band as of this this year,
Speaker 2: so you know, it's it's just never felt like something
Speaker 2: that we really missed. I think if I had to
Speaker 2: think about it really hard, you know, I wasn't around
Speaker 2: for all of my son being an infant, and I
Speaker 2: kind of maybe that would have been nice to be
Speaker 2: a part of watching that evolution and watch someone kind
Speaker 2: of become a person. But it's not something that we
Speaker 2: lament about too much.
Speaker 1: So, had you had a relationship with the mother of
Speaker 1: your son or was it a brief interlude.
Speaker 2: Somewhere in the middle. We were very fond of each
Speaker 2: other and we we spend a little bit of time together,
Speaker 2: but it was but it was brief.
Speaker 1: And so what what went through your head when you
Speaker 1: found out she was pregnant?
Speaker 2: Uh? I mean at the time, I was more worried.
Speaker 2: I mean, I mean I was more of a fuck
Speaker 2: up then, you know, I was. I was still dabbling
Speaker 2: in cocaine and brown liquor a lot, and so I
Speaker 2: think I was just I really just had these thoughts
Speaker 2: of me not being prepared, you know, like I wasn't
Speaker 2: I didn't really have a sense of like, oh my
Speaker 2: life is over, but that you know, there wasn't like
Speaker 2: this this kind of dread. I mean, I was twenty seven,
Speaker 2: so it wasn't like I was fifteen or sixteen. It
Speaker 2: was just a sense of like, I don't know if
Speaker 2: I'm as a person prepared for this task, and I
Speaker 2: need to. I need to, you know, kind of I
Speaker 2: need to be better quick.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you meet your wife pretty early in your success.
Speaker 1: Many people, you know, they want to become successful rock stars,
Speaker 1: to live the rock and roll lifestyle.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well I had, you know, a good year and
Speaker 2: a half with just fucking ran it til the brakes
Speaker 2: ran off of it. And that was you know, it
Speaker 2: was fun. But you know, Paul, my best friend, Paul,
Speaker 2: who was the drummer for Matchbox and now he's the
Speaker 2: guitar player. I mean, I remember just before I met
Speaker 2: my wife on a plane, just wasted and looking at
Speaker 2: each other and going, you know, there's more to it
Speaker 2: than this, right, Like it feels like we're kind of
Speaker 2: like in this cycle of like play, let's play a show,
Speaker 2: Let's get fucking wasted, wake up, let's do it all
Speaker 2: over again. You know, girl show, wasted show, Girl show wasted,
Speaker 2: girl show, and and so I kind of feel like
Speaker 2: I got to experience a lot of what that's about.
Speaker 2: But when I met my wife, she was young and
Speaker 2: I was young, and so we spent the next couple
Speaker 2: of years traveling around the world, you know, on this
Speaker 2: fucking grand adventure and you know, we did the drugs
Speaker 2: and we did the drinking, and we went to the
Speaker 2: parties and you know, like we Michael Littman is my
Speaker 2: original manager, Michael Littman from back in the day you
Speaker 2: just managed George. Michael managed Bowie for a while, and
Speaker 2: you know, he was one of my big role models
Speaker 2: when I first started in this business, and him and
Speaker 2: his wife in particular, because they had you know, we
Speaker 2: would go to London and they would take us to
Speaker 2: Cambridges and you know, they take us to these spots
Speaker 2: and be like, oh, this is you know where me
Speaker 2: and George did this, or me and David did this,
Speaker 2: and they would tell these great stories and it was
Speaker 2: the two of them that had done that. And she
Speaker 2: used to say, you know, oh, her name's Nancy Liman.
Speaker 2: She would say, oh, yeah, I'm a rock chick from wayback.
Speaker 2: And so now that's the joke from my wife. You know,
Speaker 2: my wife's like, you know, she's a rock chick from
Speaker 2: way back. Like we got to do that together and
Speaker 2: experience that together, which I think is so much better
Speaker 2: than the idea like me meeting someone and ten fifteen
Speaker 2: years later and having this whole other part of my
Speaker 2: life that they're not a part of. You know. It
Speaker 2: almost like we've been together a really long time and
Speaker 2: we got to be She got to be through that
Speaker 2: part of it with me, So it's not some you know,
Speaker 2: fairy tale that she hears stories about later on.
Speaker 1: So she traveled with you at first? Does she traveled
Speaker 1: with you at all? Now?
Speaker 2: Whenever she wants? I mean she you know, she's not
Speaker 2: lured by the bus anymore, you know, maybe the way
Speaker 2: I used to be, But she does like I did.
Speaker 2: I knew that she was the one when after our
Speaker 2: first time we were torn together. We're sitting like about
Speaker 2: a month or two later in our apartment and soho
Speaker 2: and she just out of nowhere she said, oh I
Speaker 2: missed the bus. Was just like, oh really, so nah,
Speaker 2: It's like I fucking love you. And then you know, well, Willy.
Speaker 2: After my time working with Willie was when I we
Speaker 2: really up and we started we got our when it
Speaker 2: was just her and Eye on a bus alone. We
Speaker 2: stopped getting hotel rooms all together, and just every every
Speaker 2: day of tour was on the bus. We would just
Speaker 2: live off that bus, and he got life was so
Speaker 2: much easier once we started to do that, and it
Speaker 2: wasn't those three o'clock in the morning, back and forth
Speaker 2: to the hotels, pack up your ship, go get a room,
Speaker 2: come back down to twelve for the you know, it
Speaker 2: was just a nightmare. And now it was just like
Speaker 2: wherever we went, we were home and it was perfect.
Speaker 2: Like I, you know, WILLI used to tell me that
Speaker 2: he would take his bus to his house, but he
Speaker 2: would still stay on his bus, like he would just
Speaker 2: do his laundry in the house, but he would just
Speaker 2: still stay on the bus and like, you know, hook
Speaker 2: up the power and the phone lines and shipped to
Speaker 2: the bus. And I was just like, oh, you're my
Speaker 2: fucking hero again.
Speaker 1: Wow. So what did the rest of the band say
Speaker 1: when all of a sudden there's this woman along with
Speaker 1: you with them?
Speaker 2: It was it was a good time, Like when when
Speaker 2: I met her. It was the next leg of our
Speaker 2: tour was about to happen, and it was the first
Speaker 2: time that we had two buses, and so everybody, what
Speaker 2: the hell just happened?
Speaker 1: I have no idea where that came from. It's like
Speaker 1: a your birthday or something. I don't know.
Speaker 2: That is awesome. So, you know.
Speaker 1: This is audio only, but all of a sudden, we
Speaker 1: saw balloons on the screen, just like to see my message.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I feel like that guy in that
Speaker 2: I am not a cat, sir. So we had two
Speaker 2: buses for the first time, and so we're we all,
Speaker 2: you know, Paul at the time, I just started dating
Speaker 2: me and Zappa and they weren't married yet, but they
Speaker 2: had just started dating. I think Brian had just met,
Speaker 2: like we had all met people, and so we everybody
Speaker 2: loved the idea that we could break off, had a
Speaker 2: little more room, and everybody could bring somebody out if
Speaker 2: they wanted to. So it's actually the perfect time for it.
Speaker 1: Okay. Anybody who's had the level of success you've had
Speaker 1: knows you're out there, you're playing to thousands of people.
Speaker 1: You know, then you go back in the dressing room
Speaker 1: with the same people you've known for ten or fifteen years.
Speaker 1: How do you calm down from a show?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean it's I think it still involves drinking.
Speaker 2: Probably it used to be more, I think, but then again,
Speaker 2: I mean, you know a lot of those highs were
Speaker 2: much higher at the very very beginning. They were new.
Speaker 2: Everything was a new experience, you know, for the first
Speaker 2: few years. Every sold out club, no matter how small,
Speaker 2: it was felt like a victory. And then you moved
Speaker 2: the theaters and then, you know, if you're fortunate enough
Speaker 2: like that, that one record had like three or four
Speaker 2: different lives over like a three year period that ended.
Speaker 2: It started with us in tiny clubs playing to nobody,
Speaker 2: and ended in sold out arenas all over the world,
Speaker 2: and so everything about that was special and new and exciting,
Speaker 2: and we were you know, and I think, just like
Speaker 2: anything else, I think, you know, when you're a race
Speaker 2: car driver, that's speed. It is exhilarating, and then over
Speaker 2: the years, everything else inside of the car slows down
Speaker 2: a little bit and you see it a little bit differently,
Speaker 2: and you're you know, like, so now when I'm on stage,
Speaker 2: it's not the show coming at me in a million
Speaker 2: miles an hour. I'm inside of it, controlling the apparatus
Speaker 2: to some degree. I'm thinking about where I'm going to be.
Speaker 2: I'm thinking about how I'm singing. I'm thinking about physicality
Speaker 2: and where I'm placing myself, thinking about what the rest
Speaker 2: of the band is doing. I'm thinking about how this
Speaker 2: is coming across. And so I think that now it's
Speaker 2: more just like, hey, everybody. Let's if we have a
Speaker 2: really great show, we all get together, we're all excited,
Speaker 2: let's toast it. Let's you know. But there's a lot
Speaker 2: of times where we can have an amazing show sold out,
Speaker 2: you know, at some amphitheater, twenty two thousand people, and
Speaker 2: I am on my bus in the shower before the
Speaker 2: place is empty, you know, because I'm also there. When
Speaker 2: you were younger, there was no tomorrow, and now only
Speaker 2: aware that that tomorrow we have to do this again.
Speaker 2: I want my voice to sound as good like if
Speaker 2: I had a great show. My first thought is, oh,
Speaker 2: wouldn't it be great if I had another one tomorrow? Like
Speaker 2: I want my voice to sound as good as it did.
Speaker 2: I want my body to have that kind of energy.
Speaker 2: I'm way more aware now than I was then of
Speaker 2: like what it takes for someone to come to see
Speaker 2: a show, Like when you see all these people and
Speaker 2: that every one of them represents somebody that chose to
Speaker 2: be there. They paid money for a ticket, they had
Speaker 2: to get parking, they had to get babysitters, you know,
Speaker 2: especially as we get older, well now as we got older,
Speaker 2: a lot of them now have kids that can be
Speaker 2: their babysitters or they're bringing their grandkids. But you know,
Speaker 2: I think it's just a different mindset that you're in.
Speaker 2: It's still exciting, but you you're I think you're you're
Speaker 2: just a little more responsible about the whole situation than
Speaker 2: you used to be.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's say, you know, you go from the stage
Speaker 1: to the shower. You still can't fall asleep right away.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, it's still we're still up late, you know.
Speaker 2: But that's luckily my wife is one of those two.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, there's been a lot of like
Speaker 2: times where I'm in there, I'm on the shower because
Speaker 2: I'm I'm now like the bus is moving, I'm on
Speaker 2: the bus showering while we're driving down the road. I've
Speaker 2: got to kind of got good bus legs, and so
Speaker 2: I come out. And then we're always like, there's a couple,
Speaker 2: you know, let's have some let's have a couple of
Speaker 2: drinks on the on the bus, you know, you know,
Speaker 2: get maybe a little somebody to eat while and then
Speaker 2: you know, we're all usually streaming something, so we go
Speaker 2: back to whatever we were watching. You know, whether it's
Speaker 2: that's when we might be a little more pull out,
Speaker 2: like the old Ken Burns jazz documentaries and shit like that.
Speaker 2: We still, like somehow exist on a lot of DVDs
Speaker 2: on the bus because you because sometimes you don't have signal,
Speaker 2: so you still have to, you know, like be tethered
Speaker 2: in some way to DVDs. Uh. So you know, I
Speaker 2: think you know you don't go to sleep, But luckily
Speaker 2: it used to no matter because your whole life worked
Speaker 2: in a cycle. Like you you can go to bed
Speaker 2: till five in the morning, but you woke up at
Speaker 2: two in the afternoon. My body, now, in my fifties,
Speaker 2: I can't sleep past nine if I try, you know,
Speaker 2: and usually I'm up at seven thirty. So even if
Speaker 2: I go to that are like three, my body's gonna
Speaker 2: get up at seven thirty. My dogs are gonna wake
Speaker 2: me up at seven thirty. I'm not gonna go back
Speaker 2: to sleep. So you know, again, that's where the responsibility
Speaker 2: has to kick in.
Speaker 1: Are you wearing an orror ring? I am, so tell
Speaker 1: me about that.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Do you have one? Now?
Speaker 1: I don't have one. I know a lot of people
Speaker 1: who have them. I've read varying reports on you know,
Speaker 1: their usability, their accuracy. What's your experience been. I.
Speaker 2: I think the only reason that I wear it is
Speaker 2: to check how my sleep was every day. It's like
Speaker 2: it's literally I I didn't get an Apple Watch. I
Speaker 2: had an Apple Watch and it was so passive aggressive,
Speaker 2: that little fucker, and like it kept telling me to
Speaker 2: stand up and go for a walk, and hey, don't
Speaker 2: forget to meditate. And now even now through my phone,
Speaker 2: my ring, like my phone will beep and just be like,
Speaker 2: hey man, it's getting time for bed. Don't you think
Speaker 2: hm out when I start winding it down, and I'm
Speaker 2: just like, fuck you. You don't know my life ring.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I don't know how long I'm going to
Speaker 2: have it. I have My manager now is Nick Litman.
Speaker 2: He's co managers with his son with his father, Michael,
Speaker 2: and he swears by this thing. So in Australia they
Speaker 2: I fucking bought into it and now I've got it,
Speaker 2: so I'm going to live with it for a while.
Speaker 2: And see. I don't see any giant insights into my
Speaker 2: life that this ring is giving me. But I am
Speaker 2: fascinated every morning with how I slept.
Speaker 1: You know, what are all the details it tells you
Speaker 1: about how you sleep?
Speaker 2: I let you know, like where you're breathing rate was
Speaker 2: while you were sleeping, but it lets you know, like
Speaker 2: you're how much time you were in RAM sleep versus
Speaker 2: deep sleep, how much time you spend in bed versus
Speaker 2: actually sleeping, you know, And like it turns out like
Speaker 2: even like if I have like a pretty high sleep
Speaker 2: score and I slept pretty well, only like fourteen minutes
Speaker 2: of that whole night was in deep sleep, which is
Speaker 2: kind of crazy, like maybe an hour and something is
Speaker 2: in r EM sleep, you know, and that's out of
Speaker 2: eight hours. So I'm not But again, Bob, one of
Speaker 2: the things is like I could do something and be like, oh,
Speaker 2: I had like a sleep score in the forties, which
Speaker 2: is kind of abysmal, and then I do something I
Speaker 2: changed something up, and I'm like, oh, you know, I didn't.
Speaker 2: I had like a couple of less glasses of wine
Speaker 2: and I didn't eat late, and I had like an
Speaker 2: eighty six sleep score. And you would think that that's
Speaker 2: the purpose of the ring, and I would go, oh,
Speaker 2: that's what I need to do now that. No, I
Speaker 2: don't change my life in any way whatsoever. I still
Speaker 2: do whatever the fuck I do, and then I just
Speaker 2: wake up the next day and go like, oh, how
Speaker 2: to go? I'm not using it the way I'm supposed to.
Speaker 1: If you had a high score and you thought back
Speaker 1: and you said, well, I didn't drink or I drank less,
Speaker 1: and I did this, and I did that, if you
Speaker 1: repeat that behavior and you get the same results.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean obviously, like any it doesn't take a
Speaker 2: psychotherapist or a medical doctor to letting you know that
Speaker 2: if you have two glasses of wine instead of six,
Speaker 2: you're probably gonna sleep a lot better. And I have
Speaker 2: like restless legs syndrome I have, but I also have
Speaker 2: a drinking problem. So what are you gonna do?
Speaker 1: Well, well, we'll define a drinking problem.
Speaker 2: I drink more than is healthy for my life.
Speaker 1: Do you drink every day?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, most days? Yeah, I mean I don't get
Speaker 2: drunk every day.
Speaker 1: But what's the earliest you'll have a drink.
Speaker 2: It depends if I'm on the road and it's a
Speaker 2: day off. I mean you might be out at lunch
Speaker 2: having some drinks. But you know that's a that's a
Speaker 2: different special situation. At home, we're more of like a
Speaker 2: six thirty seven o'clock have some wine. I mean, like
Speaker 2: I come from a world where it was shot shot, shot, shot, shot,
Speaker 2: blind line, line shot shot, smoke, smoke, line, line, pill, pill,
Speaker 2: and so so it feels pretty moderate in a relative way,
Speaker 2: you know, compared to like the gears that I but
Speaker 2: I don't have those gears anymore, you know, Like I
Speaker 2: traded that model in for a slower model. Like I
Speaker 2: don't have a sports car anymore. I'm more of a
Speaker 2: nice four door sedan. Kind of a body happening.
Speaker 1: And do you have an addictive personality? Do you need it?
Speaker 1: Or you're someone say, well, you know I can stop
Speaker 1: after a couple of drinks.
Speaker 2: I No, I don't think so at all. I think
Speaker 2: that's the thing is, I could not drink at all.
Speaker 2: But I don't have a limitter. But I'm that way
Speaker 2: with a lot of things, you know, good and bad,
Speaker 2: Like I get. I like my workouts. I will work
Speaker 2: out six days a week, seven days a week for
Speaker 2: an hour and a half two hours a day, you know,
Speaker 2: and really, and I've got it in my computer, I know,
Speaker 2: like what workouts I'm doing this and this day and
Speaker 2: this day I'm charting my progress. I'm like because I
Speaker 2: started to do it, and I was like, oh I
Speaker 2: want to. I want to do it. You know, I
Speaker 2: started to learn something, I'm like, Okay, I want to
Speaker 2: fucking learn it. I want to, you know. And so
Speaker 2: anything that I like, I don't want to get. If
Speaker 2: I buy a book and I start to like it
Speaker 2: and there's you know, sequels, I would just go buy
Speaker 2: all of them at one time now because I am
Speaker 2: now all into this. You know, do you.
Speaker 1: Work out six days a week? Yeah, by yourself with
Speaker 1: a trainer, now, by myself. So how do you get
Speaker 1: yourself motivated?
Speaker 2: Ego? Like I one of the things, you know, real
Speaker 2: talk Bob. One of the things is like, you know,
Speaker 2: at fifty two years old and I you know, I
Speaker 2: don't want to I don't want to see the big
Speaker 2: bloated pictures of me at the casino and my ed
Speaker 2: hearty T shirts and all, you know, and you're and
Speaker 2: you're like metal jewelry every you know what I mean,
Speaker 2: like still trying to hang onto that rock dream with
Speaker 2: your gut hanging out Like I mean, first off, I've
Speaker 2: never been like rock and roll guy anyway, but yeah,
Speaker 2: I know for a fact that nine the time if
Speaker 2: somebody goes, oh yeah I went and saw Rob Thomas,
Speaker 2: or I saw mashbox swinning the other night. Somebody's gonna go, oh,
Speaker 2: how do they look? How do they do it? You know?
Speaker 2: And and or at least if they if we look
Speaker 2: like shit, people are gonna stay in their noticing like,
Speaker 2: oh man, they look fucking rough. God damn like I.
Speaker 2: I I don't want you know what, I'll when we
Speaker 2: stop recording, I'll call out. I don't want to. I
Speaker 2: don't like talking about people, but I'll tell I'll give
Speaker 2: you a great example of it.
Speaker 1: Okay, Very early in your career, once you broke to
Speaker 1: the external world, it looked like it was very fast
Speaker 1: and you gained weight, and as a result of that
Speaker 1: and your instant success perceived by the public, there was
Speaker 1: a lot of blowback. How did you cope with that?
Speaker 2: Unfortunately by eating and drinking, Like I used to do cocaine,
Speaker 2: but I would only do cocaine so that I could
Speaker 2: stay awake and party more, which led to more drinking,
Speaker 2: which eventually would lead to, you know, gorging on food.
Speaker 2: So no matter how much I was doing, I was
Speaker 2: still gaining a lot of weight. The first time that
Speaker 2: we were ever mentioned in Rolling Stone at all, there
Speaker 2: was just a picture of me I had this red hoodie.
Speaker 2: It was from Glastonbury and I just looked bloated as
Speaker 2: fun and it said it said two things that were
Speaker 2: just fucking brilliant. It said one that it said Rob
Speaker 2: Thomas apparently has grown as a performer. And then it
Speaker 2: said apparently the road that success leads to the deli trade.
Speaker 2: So we got to charge out of that because at
Speaker 2: least it was clever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, we're talking decades later. It must have
Speaker 1: hurt back then.
Speaker 2: No, I mean it really did. And obviously, I mean, Bob,
Speaker 2: the thing that we're talking about now, you know, when
Speaker 2: I think about the reason in the why I'm working,
Speaker 2: why I work out six days a week, the reason,
Speaker 2: like I have an unhealthy and this is this is
Speaker 2: you know real talk to me and my therapist, you know,
Speaker 2: these are these are subjects, which is I have a
Speaker 2: very unhealthy body image and I have an unhealthy relationship
Speaker 2: with calories and food and the like because of because
Speaker 2: of that, like I you know, because it went deeper
Speaker 2: than that. It was also me I used to hate,
Speaker 2: like you know, there were always photo shoots and I
Speaker 2: fucking hated photo shoots because I felt fat because photo
Speaker 2: shoots always come with wardrobe fittings, which you hate even
Speaker 2: more because at some point there's some stylist that you
Speaker 2: don't even know, going, hey, you need to hit the gym.
Speaker 2: Huh is this? You know, You're just like ah, and
Speaker 2: so just pile And then I'm the kind of guy
Speaker 2: who will never let you know, so I'm always I'm
Speaker 2: laughing it off to your face and then the you know,
Speaker 2: drinking it back away, and so you know, it stuck
Speaker 2: with me pretty hard. My wife, I think, you know,
Speaker 2: ever since I met her, it was just on a
Speaker 2: much healthier path, you know, not just for aesthetics, but
Speaker 2: just you know, aesthetics are a lucky byproduct of that,
Speaker 2: you know, being healthier.
Speaker 1: So your reference drugs a number of times like that
Speaker 1: was in the past. So what's the status of drugs today?
Speaker 2: Uh? Alcohol, caffeine, weed? So none?
Speaker 1: Was that a conscious decision, a hard decision, or just
Speaker 1: so all of a sudden you woke up one day
Speaker 1: and you weren't doing it.
Speaker 2: That wasn't too hard. I mean I really miss sometimes
Speaker 2: I miss psychedelics sometimes, you know, I miss and I
Speaker 2: missed like maybe ecstasy. You know, we used to have
Speaker 2: a lot of fun. Uh, you know, takeing ecstasy, but
Speaker 2: cocaine was easy to give up. I think it was
Speaker 2: just one you just have to be have one time
Speaker 2: where you look at the people that are in your life,
Speaker 2: that are only in your life because you're doing cocaine,
Speaker 2: and how fucking how just how much you hate them,
Speaker 2: and then you see yourself in them and you go,
Speaker 2: oh my god, that's who I am, you know, like
Speaker 2: I'm hanging out with this person that I've never met
Speaker 2: before in my entire life, and we're talking about opening
Speaker 2: a club together tomorrow, you know, those kind of nights.
Speaker 2: And so that was pretty easy to be like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm okay with Without that part of my life happened anymore.
Speaker 1: Now I can see on the zoom you're wearing a
Speaker 1: bracelet with letters on like a friendship bracelet.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, one from a fan and one from my niece.
Speaker 2: But it's not as cute as it sounds. My niece
Speaker 2: is in her mid thirties.
Speaker 1: Okay, do they say anything specific?
Speaker 2: One has my dog Sammy's name on it, who passed away,
Speaker 2: and then one just says Matt twenty because uh, because
Speaker 2: I'm a fan.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned a therapist, So when did you start
Speaker 1: and how much do you go now.
Speaker 2: Uh, once every couple of weeks, maybe a year and
Speaker 2: a half ago, two years ago I had I started.
Speaker 2: Five years ago, I had my first time ever going
Speaker 2: to a therapist, and I swear to God, like five
Speaker 2: it's like a fifth session. And she just fell asleep
Speaker 2: in the middle of the session, and when I called
Speaker 2: her on it, she just said I was boring her,
Speaker 2: And so I think in some way, I was like,
Speaker 2: I fucking knew this is what it was. I knew
Speaker 2: this is what it's gonna be the you know what
Speaker 2: I mean, And so that put me off it for
Speaker 2: a little while. Now I have one who I like
Speaker 2: a lot. Honestly, I think that she agrees with me
Speaker 2: a little too much, you might, and so I still
Speaker 2: might be in a phase now where I need to
Speaker 2: someone who challenges me a little more. So that might
Speaker 2: be my next stage in that evolution.
Speaker 1: What motivated you to go to begin with?
Speaker 2: You know, I got there's a lot of unresolved. My
Speaker 2: mother and I had a very complicated relationship. It's almost like,
Speaker 2: if you go like reasons for therapy number one, this
Speaker 2: is you know, so my mother and I had a
Speaker 2: very complicated relationship, that was never resolved when she passed away,
Speaker 2: and that was kind of always in there, and I
Speaker 2: see these parts of her that I hated, that I
Speaker 2: see inside of myself, and I wanted to explore those
Speaker 2: a little bit. I wanted to kind of explore, h
Speaker 2: explore my reasons for why why I'm you know, why
Speaker 2: why the drinking and why sometimes I let it get
Speaker 2: out of control to a certain you know. And I
Speaker 2: just had questions that I wasn't and that I couldn't
Speaker 2: answer myself, even though I was the only one that
Speaker 2: contained the answers. But I just did have a key
Speaker 2: to figure out how to find that answer.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you grew up in South Carolina. We're in
Speaker 1: South Carolina.
Speaker 2: So between a place called Lake City, South Carolina, which
Speaker 2: is like a very small tobacco town maybe an hour
Speaker 2: from Myrtle Beach and a little time in Columbia, but
Speaker 2: in Lake City. So Lake City, we we lived in
Speaker 2: my grandmother's house. So my grandmother was this character. So
Speaker 2: it was like a kind of like I guess you
Speaker 2: would call it a general store in a sense, right.
Speaker 2: It was the local gas station where all the tobacco
Speaker 2: farmers would come on their lunch break and they could
Speaker 2: get you know, they would get get a coke or
Speaker 2: a hot dog or whatever. People would be on their
Speaker 2: way to the beach sometimes were stopping get gas. She
Speaker 2: brewedleg liquor from a room under the stairs and had
Speaker 2: sold weed out of her room in the back. So
Speaker 2: when I was like ten years old, I could, I could,
Speaker 2: I was separating stems and seeds out of this weed,
Speaker 2: making like in like weighing out dining bags and nickel bags.
Speaker 2: Like at least once a year somebody got shot at
Speaker 2: this place. It was like it was like one of
Speaker 2: these kind of a shack of a store where like
Speaker 2: there's a wood floor, but if there was a hole
Speaker 2: in it, it went straight to the ground kind of thing.
Speaker 2: You know. It was very much a very you know,
Speaker 2: very modest to say the least place. And so we
Speaker 2: that was my grandmother's uh play, And she was a
Speaker 2: character who had never she never drank. And then once
Speaker 2: a year, once every two years, she would go on
Speaker 2: like a two week vendor that would somehow like end
Speaker 2: up with her out in front of the store with
Speaker 2: a gun. Like she was you know, she was either
Speaker 2: like the nicest, sweetest carrying person or just a fucking
Speaker 2: you know, powder cake. So it was interesting, it was
Speaker 2: you know, it was just it was a very interesting thing.
Speaker 2: And then my mom moved us out to Florida. So
Speaker 2: it was at a time where like she got a
Speaker 2: job as a computer programmer, but nobody even knew what
Speaker 2: that was. So they were just hiring people off the
Speaker 2: street and sending them to school to learn because they
Speaker 2: were still doing it with computer cards at the time.
Speaker 2: And if you remember that, time punches all. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: she was learning cobalt and all these and then as
Speaker 2: soon as she'd learned it, there'd be a whole new
Speaker 2: operating system and she'd go to where met And when
Speaker 2: she was sixteen, she lied about her age or for
Speaker 2: a first job and said that she was nineteen. And
Speaker 2: I was born when she was twenty one. My sister
Speaker 2: was born when she was sixteen, and she just kept
Speaker 2: working her way up through these so by the time
Speaker 2: she had passed away, you know, she had moved us
Speaker 2: to a really nice, middle class neighborhood. Like we went
Speaker 2: from living in like the dingy, shitty apartments on that
Speaker 2: side of town that nobody wants to go to to
Speaker 2: like a really nice place in Wakaiva, Florida, which was
Speaker 2: like middle class, beautiful neighborhood. She was the head of
Speaker 2: Q of Quality Assurance for City Bank and for their
Speaker 2: security team in banking. You know, she was very respected,
Speaker 2: and then I think she probably drank herself out of
Speaker 2: a job and then drank herself to death later on.
Speaker 1: Let's go back your grandmother. What were her parents? How
Speaker 1: did she end up there?
Speaker 2: I never knew her father, I knew her I didn't.
Speaker 2: I mean, it was just this magical place that just
Speaker 2: appeared to me. You know. That was where my history
Speaker 2: of my family and everybody began. And it's hard to
Speaker 2: get a straight answer about anything that happened before that.
Speaker 2: You know, my like my I know my aunt. My
Speaker 2: mother had a sister. Her name is Marcella Summers, and
Speaker 2: we used to call her Monkey and she spent she
Speaker 2: spent most of my life in prison in South Carolina
Speaker 2: because she hired a serial killer named pee Wee Gaskins.
Speaker 2: And there's a book about him that's out and she
Speaker 2: actually has a chapter in it. She hired pee Wee
Speaker 2: Gascons to kill her boyfriend over a Dodge two eighty
Speaker 2: Z that like he had given her as a gift
Speaker 2: and they broke up and he took it back. So
Speaker 2: she met with Peewe Gaston's had him killed and then
Speaker 2: shoved into the trunk of that car and then pushed
Speaker 2: the car into the river. But then she got arrested
Speaker 2: for it, and so she spent most of my life
Speaker 2: in prison. So that's the only other family member that
Speaker 2: I knew.
Speaker 1: Okay, the husband of your grandmother, what was his story?
Speaker 2: There was no husband. Since I was a little kid,
Speaker 2: she was. I mean, as far as I knew she
Speaker 2: was asexual, and then I found out later she wasn't.
Speaker 2: But but she no, I never there was never there
Speaker 2: was a husband. I think his name was Floyd, but
Speaker 2: I've never met him. I think, I don't think I've
Speaker 2: seen pictures of him. These are the stories that my
Speaker 2: mom used to tell me.
Speaker 1: Okay, So your grandmother started the shop herself.
Speaker 2: Her, I think her. I don't think it's her father.
Speaker 2: I think it's her stepfather started Willie. It's a great name, really,
Speaker 2: Grandpa Willy. He started the store and then it was
Speaker 2: called Kirby Grocery, and then she took it over. You know,
Speaker 2: years later. I just knew, like when I was born,
Speaker 2: like I pictures of me as a baby in that store,
Speaker 2: So I'm not sure how long she had had it
Speaker 2: before then.
Speaker 1: And what happened to the store.
Speaker 2: I found out later on that had burned out. My
Speaker 2: one of my cousins burned it down for insurance. Like
Speaker 2: here's how my family went. My cousin, one of my
Speaker 2: cousins and his sister got their mother my aunt hooked
Speaker 2: on crack and then they all tried to burn down
Speaker 2: the store for like some insurance money. But I didn't
Speaker 2: know any of this. I took my wife, I think
Speaker 2: we weren't even married yet, and we were going on
Speaker 2: a trip through South Carolina and we reren in her
Speaker 2: car and I was going to go show her, you know,
Speaker 2: this visual history of my you know, my past, and
Speaker 2: we got to the spot where the store was, it
Speaker 2: was just ashes, Like I had no idea. That was
Speaker 2: a devastating moment for me too, Like I just I
Speaker 2: think you just always, like I, throughout my life, I
Speaker 2: would check up on it, Like I would leave home
Speaker 2: when I was like sixteen seventeen and hitchhike from Florida
Speaker 2: up to South Carolina and kind of check in on
Speaker 2: my grandmother and that you know, that little contingent in
Speaker 2: my family, and so I like, I just assumed, I
Speaker 2: guess like people do, that it was just there waiting
Speaker 2: for me always, and then one day I went there
Speaker 2: and it just wasn't there anymore. My only people that
Speaker 2: I in my family really that I still have or
Speaker 2: my sister, who I'm very close to. She's the only
Speaker 2: person in my family that I'm really close to. My father,
Speaker 2: who I have somewhat of a relationship but was certainly
Speaker 2: not close. And that's it. I mean, really, I think
Speaker 2: I've got a cousin that once every two years might
Speaker 2: stop by, know, say hi at a show or something.
Speaker 2: But yeah, that's pretty much my sister and sometimes my dad.
Speaker 1: So did her father ever show up when you grew up.
Speaker 2: My sister's father, Yeah, a couple of times. I actually
Speaker 2: know him. He comes to shows all the time. He
Speaker 2: lives in Chicago. He's a really nice guy. I see him,
Speaker 2: you know, quite often. I my mother, So my mother
Speaker 2: in law and my father in law are really really
Speaker 2: been my family over the last twenty six years. In
Speaker 2: my because I it was the first time I'd ever
Speaker 2: had a relationship. Like when I moved to New York,
Speaker 2: I remember like we would go on the road and
Speaker 2: my wife would call and say, oh, you know, we're
Speaker 2: going home in a couple of days. My mom went
Speaker 2: by the apartment. She cleaned it up, and she like
Speaker 2: restocked the groceries and she, you know, just stuff there.
Speaker 2: And I was legitimately thinking like, like what's her fucking angle,
Speaker 2: you know, like why would somebody do that? And she's like, well,
Speaker 2: she loves us, and she's doing it because you know,
Speaker 2: she cares about us. And I that was just foreign
Speaker 2: to me. And I, you know, when I grew up,
Speaker 2: my mother was young. She admitted, you know, she had
Speaker 2: like I said, she had my sister at sixteen, had
Speaker 2: me in twenty one. There's a whole part of her
Speaker 2: youth that she felt like she missed out on. Then
Speaker 2: when I was like twelve, she got cancer. They thought
Speaker 2: she was going to die. They give her six months
Speaker 2: to live, and she beat it, and then she got
Speaker 2: it again, and then she beat it. And I think
Speaker 2: that all the time in between those moments, she was
Speaker 2: just out there making up for lost time. And so
Speaker 2: that required her to be really really selfish at a
Speaker 2: time when I needed her not to be. And so
Speaker 2: I just never had the experience of someone maternal having
Speaker 2: that kind of care, like maternal care and so ever.
Speaker 2: You know, ever since, like my mother in law has
Speaker 2: become one of my my dearest friends in the world.
Speaker 2: We spend a lot of time together, just her and I.
Speaker 2: We go to shows together, we go out to dinner,
Speaker 2: we hang out all the time. And so I, you know,
Speaker 2: got to got to really estee what I was like.
Speaker 2: So it just my I never really mind my actually
Speaker 2: with except my sister. I never really found it in
Speaker 2: my actual family.
Speaker 1: So when you were growing up, was your father in
Speaker 1: the picture?
Speaker 2: Now I found out litter. I mean, I think my
Speaker 2: dad was scared of my mom in a lot of ways,
Speaker 2: you know, they she was volatile, and I guess I
Speaker 2: didn't know at the time, like I was, I didn't
Speaker 2: have my dad's number. I didn't know why. And it
Speaker 2: turned out because I had it, that my mom would
Speaker 2: get it. Then she might start calling at three o'clock
Speaker 2: in the morning, you know, and harassing him or whatever.
Speaker 2: But I didn't know any of these things. I just
Speaker 2: felt like my dad wasn't around because he just wasn't around.
Speaker 2: And then I think I got I got to a
Speaker 2: certain point where I learned how to live on my own.
Speaker 2: I mean, like literally on my own. Like I left
Speaker 2: home at like seventeen, I was living, you know, in
Speaker 2: friends cars and on friends park benches. And the next
Speaker 2: thing I knew that I was in a band. I
Speaker 2: was living on friends couches, and then we were playing shows,
Speaker 2: and then I never I learned how to not need someone,
Speaker 2: and so then by the time my dad kind of
Speaker 2: came back around, which honestly wasn't until I started to
Speaker 2: do well in music. By the time he came back around,
Speaker 2: I just didn't need that anymore. That wasn't what I
Speaker 2: was looking for in a relationship, you know. And I
Speaker 2: don't know, I'm sure I missed out on some things,
Speaker 2: but I learned to be pretty self sufficient as well.
Speaker 2: And I learned how to make a lot of lemonade
Speaker 2: out of limits when I needed to.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're close to your sister. Your father comes back
Speaker 1: in the picture. You see your sister's father. Are they
Speaker 1: a asking for money? B Do you support them?
Speaker 2: No, My sister has once begrudgingly asked me for money
Speaker 2: and then paid me back. My sister's father's never asked
Speaker 2: me for anything at all. And I said this is
Speaker 2: just a genuinely one of the best people that has
Speaker 2: ever existed in the world. And I think, you know
Speaker 2: her and I we're victims of a trauma together, you know,
Speaker 2: like we went through a lot and through that with
Speaker 2: our mother, you know, and she a lot, a lot
Speaker 2: of kind of rage and violence and uncertainty and being
Speaker 2: gone for days and days and us being alone and
Speaker 2: hunkering down together. That makes you really really close, and
Speaker 2: so the two of us, it drives her husband insane.
Speaker 2: So my sister ran away from home at seventeen years
Speaker 2: old married her twenty one year old boyfriend, which is
Speaker 2: a recipe for disaster, except for the fact that they've
Speaker 2: now been married for over forty years. They're one of
Speaker 2: the closest couples I know. They have kids, their kids
Speaker 2: have kids, They're a great success story. And so it
Speaker 2: drives them insane because when the two of us get
Speaker 2: together and we just start telling these stories about our
Speaker 2: childhood but with a very nonchalant kind of thing, and
Speaker 2: he's just like, the fuck, where the fuck did you look?
Speaker 2: What is this your life? You know? So we both
Speaker 2: realized that we kind of we kind of share that.
Speaker 1: So how old were you when you moved from South
Speaker 1: Carolina to Florida.
Speaker 2: Let's see. I think I was in I want to say,
Speaker 2: six or seventh grade middle school.
Speaker 1: So you're living with your mother. Grandmother is quite a character.
Speaker 1: Father's not around. Does this impact your identity in school? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I think so. I mean in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2: I you know, my mom at the time. So my mom,
Speaker 2: you know, single, So she's dating a lot of guys
Speaker 2: and then kind of become we become whatever she was
Speaker 2: dating at the time. Does that make sense? So like
Speaker 2: when she's dating a biker, we're all bikers right now,
Speaker 2: and she's dating like a businessman, then we're all, you know,
Speaker 2: we need to come on, act like people. Come on.
Speaker 2: I think, you know, having all of this weird turmoil
Speaker 2: at home with my mom, I was acting out a
Speaker 2: lot in school. I didn't it really hit me. I
Speaker 2: think when I was in like ninth grade and a
Speaker 2: guidance counselor pulled me aside and had me come into
Speaker 2: her office and said, so, you know, you can answer
Speaker 2: this however you want, but are your parents alcoholics? And
Speaker 2: I was like, I don't. My mom drinks a lot,
Speaker 2: you know, and she just kind of pegged me as
Speaker 2: this very this is this is this type of personality,
Speaker 2: the type personality comes from this kind of a situation.
Speaker 2: I was definitely every I went to a lot of schools.
Speaker 2: We moved around a lot within Florida. But every school
Speaker 2: I went to, I was the kid who was squandering
Speaker 2: his potential, you know, because I was the kid who
Speaker 2: tested through the roof whenever we do aptitude tests. But
Speaker 2: I never applied myself in anything whatsoever. I you know,
Speaker 2: when I showed up at all, I would I was
Speaker 2: more disruptive than anything else. I would already like starting
Speaker 2: to play music. I had someone I ran into that
Speaker 2: was in a class with me in ninth grade that
Speaker 2: I was explaining to my algebra teacher that I didn't
Speaker 2: need algebra because I was going to be a musician
Speaker 2: and so I didn't really have to worry about that.
Speaker 2: And then she's like, well, who's going to count all
Speaker 2: your money? And I was like, my accountant is going
Speaker 2: to count all my money. It turns out I was
Speaker 2: right about that.
Speaker 1: So you were that kid? Did you have friends? Were
Speaker 1: you popular? Were the loner or the guy who fought?
Speaker 1: What kind of kid were you like in school?
Speaker 2: I was all of those things like I didn't have
Speaker 2: a clique, but I got along very easily, which I
Speaker 2: think is another trade of children of alcoholics. I got
Speaker 2: along very easily with every group. So like on a
Speaker 2: Saturday night, I could go to pretty much any group
Speaker 2: of party and I would be able to come in.
Speaker 2: I knew people pretty much everywhere there. But like you know,
Speaker 2: this group of friends on Saturday afternoons would all get
Speaker 2: together and meet up and go to the beach. I
Speaker 2: was never part of that group, but they would get
Speaker 2: together on Friday night and go to movie. I wasn't
Speaker 2: part of that group. But if there was like a
Speaker 2: general collection, I was always welcome in any of those studies.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: And at that point you're in high school, was there
Speaker 1: enough money that if you needed something your mother could
Speaker 1: buy it for you. It was always like an issue
Speaker 1: having money to get shit.
Speaker 2: We had money, but it was mom. It wasn't she
Speaker 2: was big on spending money on herself. Honestly, like my
Speaker 2: drives my wife insane because she'll talk about like she
Speaker 2: did this, and I was like, yeah, I never get
Speaker 2: to do that. I never get to do this. I
Speaker 2: never got to get this. I was I think it
Speaker 2: manifested itself a lot too, and like I got into
Speaker 2: a lot of trouble. I got arrested quite a bit.
Speaker 2: I started to really get like my first I got
Speaker 2: arrested for the first time ever for arm to burglary.
Speaker 1: Okay, tell us this story.
Speaker 2: It sounds worse than it is. Honestly it was. It's
Speaker 2: the thing where we would break into people's homes that
Speaker 2: we knew and rearrange their furniture. You know, we never
Speaker 2: really stole anything, well I can't. Sometimes we would like
Speaker 2: steal a beer. You know, it was we And honest
Speaker 2: when I say this, Bob, I want you to understand now.
Speaker 2: I realized that that if you're a homeowner and you
Speaker 2: come home and that's how it's you feel violated, you
Speaker 2: know what I mean, Like, it's a horrible if I
Speaker 2: grew up.
Speaker 1: Too, is the same thing. One time we went away
Speaker 1: and somebody came in stole Magical Mystery Tour which had
Speaker 1: just come out, and my father's changed first, nothing else.
Speaker 1: They just wanted to break And I know exactly what
Speaker 1: you're talking about. But if it's armed, Rob, where's the gun?
Speaker 2: Well, the gun was in the home. And honestly, it
Speaker 2: was a very scary moment when I think about it,
Speaker 2: because the guy that when the guys I was with
Speaker 2: found this gun, was kind of fucking around with it.
Speaker 2: He's like, no, there's nothing in here, and he was
Speaker 2: pointed at me and I'm like, dude, just don't whatever,
Speaker 2: I don't trust it, don't point it at me. And
Speaker 2: he went like this and he shot it and it
Speaker 2: shot through the through the wall, and I was like,
Speaker 2: holy fuck, and he put the gun back. So because
Speaker 2: there now there this was a break in, but a
Speaker 2: gun was involved, which made it an armed burglar not
Speaker 2: an armed robbery. There's a very big difference. And so
Speaker 2: I got arrested. I remember, I remember what this is
Speaker 2: one of the few moments where I and I think
Speaker 2: it was again because my mother was dating a respectable guy,
Speaker 2: and so because of that, he went the guy she
Speaker 2: was dating on my court date to find out what
Speaker 2: my fate was going to be, went out and got
Speaker 2: me like a suit, the jacket and a tie, you know,
Speaker 2: court suit, and then then let me know as we're
Speaker 2: about to leave that they just were holding on him
Speaker 2: to make me feel nervous because they had already gotten
Speaker 2: the word back. I wasn't going to jail I had
Speaker 2: a certain amount of community hours and this thing on
Speaker 2: my record up until I was like eighteen, and then
Speaker 2: that was the only thing that was going to happen.
Speaker 2: And I just remember, like I still had the picture
Speaker 2: of me in that suit with this look on my
Speaker 2: face and just like ah, like you know, and that
Speaker 2: was one of the I think. I mean, I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: I don't think that was a seminal point in my life.
Speaker 2: I mean, I didn't change anything at that point, but
Speaker 2: it was definitely it's a vivid memory that I what.
Speaker 1: Did your mother say when you got arrested.
Speaker 2: I don't think she was surprised. I mean I wasn't
Speaker 2: hanging out with the like you know, when your mom
Speaker 2: always tells you, you keep hanging out with those guys,
Speaker 2: you're gonna you're gonna wind up dead or in jail.
Speaker 2: I mean she knew that, and luckily it was jail.
Speaker 1: Well, you mentioned a number of rests. What were the
Speaker 1: other arrests?
Speaker 2: Uh? I got arrested once for Steele in a car.
Speaker 2: I gotta I almost got to wrest with once for
Speaker 2: Steele in a house, which is kind of weird, like
Speaker 2: somebody had like gone on vacation and So the neighbor
Speaker 2: was a friend of mine, and the neighbor like broke
Speaker 2: into the house and they just but through a fucking
Speaker 2: rager of a party. I mean, like cars around the block,
Speaker 2: like not subtle in any way whatsoever. And I attend
Speaker 2: this party. But then I wake up and me and
Speaker 2: this girl are like the only people in the house,
Speaker 2: and there's cops beating on the bedroom door. So then
Speaker 2: it's just me, and I'm like, so I just tell
Speaker 2: the cops that I'm from Alabama, that I just came
Speaker 2: in to meet a friend, you know, and I'll go
Speaker 2: get my friend. And I went out the door and
Speaker 2: I just ran as far as I could. And that's
Speaker 2: the last I've heard of that situation.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you ended up dropping out of high school,
Speaker 1: tell us about that.
Speaker 2: I dropped out of high school. I got my ged
Speaker 2: only because I thought that I was going to join
Speaker 2: the army. Like I went to the army recruitment place
Speaker 2: I took I guess what's called the ASPAB, which is
Speaker 2: just like your placement for you know, your aptitude tests
Speaker 2: to join the army. Turns out it's not a it's
Speaker 2: not a very high bar. And I fucking aced it.
Speaker 2: I got like a ninety nine or something on it,
Speaker 2: and it was incredible, and they we're very excited, but
Speaker 2: they said, you know you, but you have to have
Speaker 2: a high school diploma, so you have to go. So
Speaker 2: I went. I didn't I didn't take the class or anything.
Speaker 2: I just went and got a ged and then luckily
Speaker 2: in that time, I met this group of guys. They
Speaker 2: were older, they were seniors in high school age, and
Speaker 2: I was in freshman in high school age, maybe a junior,
Speaker 2: because at this point, at some point I left school.
Speaker 2: But then I tried to come back, like in the
Speaker 2: tenth Like I left like maybe the beginning of tenth grade,
Speaker 2: and I tried to come back by the beginning of
Speaker 2: junior year kind of thing. But it didn't last long,
Speaker 2: and I wound up, you know, meeting these guys. One
Speaker 2: of them was graduating that year and going to Berkeley
Speaker 2: the next year.
Speaker 1: Berkeley College of Music and Music.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Berkeley ee of Boston that my son later
Speaker 2: graduated from. And so it was through them that like
Speaker 2: I started like learning how to He would give me
Speaker 2: all of his music books, so I would learn like
Speaker 2: chord structure and some music theory, you know, mixed with
Speaker 2: you know, with practical books of how to play music
Speaker 2: and teaching myself song by song, you know, every chord
Speaker 2: and every notation in this song that I know, and
Speaker 2: then this song and you know, and just keep doing
Speaker 2: that and doing that. I wasn't really writing yet. I
Speaker 2: was singing songs that these guys were writing, or we
Speaker 2: were doing covers and playing like eighteen and underclubs in Florida,
Speaker 2: you know, those kind of a and it just I mean,
Speaker 2: that was just it. That was I felt like this
Speaker 2: was what I wanted to do. I knew it immediately
Speaker 2: from the first time that I just started playing. I
Speaker 2: was like this, they just spoke to me, you know,
Speaker 2: And yeah, I mean I think it wasn't for that.
Speaker 2: I mean, honestly, I was the only reason I wanted
Speaker 2: to join the Army was because when you were in
Speaker 2: when we were in high school, where did you grow up?
Speaker 1: Connecticut?
Speaker 2: All right? So I don't know if they did this
Speaker 2: in Connecticut, but like there would be a day once
Speaker 2: a year where you go out to like the pavilion
Speaker 2: or wherever outdoors, you know, lunch section or maybe in
Speaker 2: the cafeteria, and there was a band set up, like
Speaker 2: a full band. They're playing like you're like hits from today,
Speaker 2: but they're all in Army fatigues and they're all the
Speaker 2: Army band.
Speaker 1: You know, I went to high school in the Vietnam era.
Speaker 1: Believe me, that wasn't happening.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, okay, So this was like their recruitment catch.
Speaker 2: It was like, hey, look how fucking cool the Army is. Man.
Speaker 2: We're laid back, We're just like you. We're playing Terrence
Speaker 2: Trent Darby man, you know, like we're fucking we're playing
Speaker 2: the cure like this is where your people. You can
Speaker 2: come to the Army. You want to do this? And
Speaker 2: I was like, oh that shit worked on me immediately.
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, I could be this this, but
Speaker 2: I can all but I can join the Army and
Speaker 2: and have a you know, figure out what I'm going
Speaker 2: to do with my life and my even though my dad,
Speaker 2: who was in the Army, the only piece of advice
Speaker 2: he ever gave me was never joined the army. And
Speaker 2: I was this close to. I was this close to
Speaker 2: doing it. Like those recruitment videos, man, they really do work.
Speaker 2: If you're out of options.
Speaker 1: Usually, once they get their hooks in you, they don't
Speaker 1: let you go that easily. Usually they track you down
Speaker 1: to try to join. When you said you weren't going
Speaker 1: to join, they keep coming after you.
Speaker 2: I think it's a lot easier to track you now.
Speaker 2: Well now it's a lot easier in general, but it's
Speaker 2: a lot easier if you haven't addressed like you know,
Speaker 2: I was pretty fluid at the time.
Speaker 1: Okay, So where did this music thing start?
Speaker 2: I really don't know. I mean, I I remember, like
Speaker 2: my sister saying that when I was like ten, eight
Speaker 2: to ten, I would I would like write little songs
Speaker 2: and I would put on little shows for my parents,
Speaker 2: you know, or for my sister for like cause it
Speaker 2: was okay, this is another story that's going to sound satisfyed,
Speaker 2: but I there's no other way to tell it. So,
Speaker 2: like one of the things was, like, you know, growing up,
Speaker 2: when I was in like, you know, eighth grade, beginning
Speaker 2: ninth grade, my mom, you know, she'd be out, she
Speaker 2: would meet some guys. She'd bring them home and then
Speaker 2: wake me up at you know, one in the morning
Speaker 2: to like keep him company and like go play a
Speaker 2: song on your keyboard. So I'm like performing for some
Speaker 2: stranger while my mom goes and changes I goes. It
Speaker 2: was a weird kind of thing, but it it gave
Speaker 2: me the sense of like, oh wow, like this is
Speaker 2: this is where my mom has her pride in me,
Speaker 2: you know. And so when I perform that mean you
Speaker 2: know that that's I get this rush of endorphins of like, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, I feel and that never went away, that
Speaker 2: you know, that need for you know, for that I
Speaker 2: that what is it? Robin Williams caught it like the
Speaker 2: the kind of love that you can only the kind
Speaker 2: of a hug that you can only get from a stranger,
Speaker 2: you know, like I learned to I learned to really
Speaker 2: crave that, uh during that time. But I think it was,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe the fact that it was these guys
Speaker 2: that I met to me they were really cool. Like
Speaker 2: they weren't degenerates like my other group of friends. They
Speaker 2: were they still had fun, They still were out drinking,
Speaker 2: they were partying, they were doing but they there was
Speaker 2: a wholesome noess about it, and there was a camaraderie
Speaker 2: and a fraternal order to it that was really really cool,
Speaker 2: you know. And uh and so and they like when
Speaker 2: I would talk about, you know, well, we're gonna go
Speaker 2: out and we're gonna you know, like we're gonna vandalize this,
Speaker 2: and we're gonna do this there would they looked at
Speaker 2: me with like such disappointment, like, oh, come on, man,
Speaker 2: that's not not cool, you know, And I wanted to
Speaker 2: I wanted them to like me, you know, this older
Speaker 2: group of guys that thought I was cool. I wanted
Speaker 2: them to like me. So I think, you know, just
Speaker 2: like everybody else, I you could trace everything back to
Speaker 2: needing some you get something you need from from a situation,
Speaker 2: and you keep chasing that feeling, you know. And so
Speaker 2: music really I felt I felt that like that that
Speaker 2: little missing piece they kept every time I was around music,
Speaker 2: every time I was playing music. It kind of filled
Speaker 2: that hole for me a little bit, and still does.
Speaker 1: Honestly, what about music lessons learning how to play the piano,
Speaker 1: the guitaris.
Speaker 2: I wish that I had taken them, honestly. I mean,
Speaker 2: I I'm a pretty good piano player. I wish that
Speaker 2: I had taken piano because it wouldn't take me as
Speaker 2: long to get it, you know, to get better at it.
Speaker 2: I wish I had taken guitar, but I'm like a
Speaker 2: really shitty guitar player. Like at some point, if I'm
Speaker 2: writing a song on the guitar, I might have to
Speaker 2: put it down and go to the piano because I hit,
Speaker 2: I hit a chord that I know that I want
Speaker 2: to get to, but I don't know it on the
Speaker 2: on the guitar. You know, Like, now I've got it
Speaker 2: down to a science where I could play in front
Speaker 2: of twenty thousand people, and if I know the song,
Speaker 2: I will fool even you to look like I know
Speaker 2: what the hell I'm doing, you know, but I tell everybody.
Speaker 2: You know, when you always get asked questions about advice
Speaker 2: for young musicians things like that, it's like, no matter
Speaker 2: how uncool it seems, go take the lessons, learn the road,
Speaker 2: you know, like learn and learn all of these basic
Speaker 2: things that's going to make your life so much easier.
Speaker 2: And no matter how cool the guitarist, start on the piano,
Speaker 2: because if you start on the piano, you can pivot
Speaker 2: to almost any instrument because the music makes more sense
Speaker 2: to you. It's laid out on the piano the same
Speaker 2: way it is on the page. And you know, if
Speaker 2: you know what I'm saying, like there's a there's a
Speaker 2: certain sense where the skills are all just right there
Speaker 2: in front of you.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're gonna go in the army. You meet these
Speaker 1: guys going to Berkeley. So what's the next step. How
Speaker 1: do you ultimately perform?
Speaker 2: Well, we play a lot of like, you know, friends parties,
Speaker 2: Like I said, these kind of like.
Speaker 1: And what's your role? Are you the front guy.
Speaker 2: On the front guy? Like? Okay? Our songs are like Hunger,
Speaker 2: like the Wolf Lady in Red's Tall Cool and remember
Speaker 2: the Robert Plant solo Tall Cool One. I'm only saying
Speaker 2: these to give you a sense of reference of the time,
Speaker 2: right this absolutely these kind of eighty songs mixed in
Speaker 2: with stuff like old time rock and roll and things
Speaker 2: that we ass like we gotta we gotta gig one time.
Speaker 2: One of the fun of the times I quit school
Speaker 2: is because all Right, the keyboard player, his family knew
Speaker 2: how had family friends that owned a sheraton in Vero
Speaker 2: Beach and needed a band to play by the pool.
Speaker 2: And so we were the pool band in this sheraton
Speaker 2: in Vero Beach. And then we got to stay at
Speaker 2: the hotel and we imploded within a week. Within a week,
Speaker 2: we had figured out how to break in to steal
Speaker 2: all the liquor from the places I was. I was,
Speaker 2: I was sleeping with the owner's daughter. Like the whole
Speaker 2: thing just fell around us. And I remember the owner
Speaker 2: she had like broken English, and she was like pulled
Speaker 2: us in and they're just so disappointed and yelling at
Speaker 2: us across the dead and she's just going, you you
Speaker 2: are not the stars. Maybe one day, one day you
Speaker 2: will be the stars. But right now, you are not
Speaker 2: the stars. And we got fired from that. So we
Speaker 2: were doing these kind of gigs and then I like
Speaker 2: they went off. We had a band called Tidal Wave,
Speaker 2: which was a we would play metal clubs and it
Speaker 2: was all like punk versions of like surf songs. So
Speaker 2: it was like like the covers would be like Wily Bully,
Speaker 2: but like these like amped up versions of Willly Bully.
Speaker 2: And it was a bunch of these guys from Jersey
Speaker 2: that had come down. So this was like after the
Speaker 2: guy went to Berkeley the first year, he came back
Speaker 2: in the summer and brought some guys from Berkeley back.
Speaker 2: We started Tidal Wave, these guys from Jersey that had
Speaker 2: never been to the fucking beach, writing all these songs
Speaker 2: about like Johnny's Got a Wave and me and my
Speaker 2: surfer girl. They were all these you know, and we
Speaker 2: would play these metal band metal clubs, and the metal
Speaker 2: clubs would love us because we had so much energy.
Speaker 2: We were just fucking running and jumping on the bar
Speaker 2: and just like fucking ah, and they just thought it was,
Speaker 2: you know, the greatest thing in the world. They didn't
Speaker 2: like the music, and so we had that going. Eventually,
Speaker 2: that whole thing, you know, it was it was just
Speaker 2: kind of dependent on them when they were home for
Speaker 2: the summers and things like that. And so I started
Speaker 2: to just get jobs, like normal jobs, restaurants, a lot
Speaker 2: of construction in Florida, like working as a roofer and
Speaker 2: drywall and painting and those kind of things. And then
Speaker 2: I started writing again on my piano. I was hitchhiking
Speaker 2: a little bit here and there. I had this little
Speaker 2: keyboard that I still have over here that I was
Speaker 2: like on the I remember, like three o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 2: I would sit on the side of the road my
Speaker 2: little keyboard, you know, working out songs. Three Am was
Speaker 2: a song that came during that time. And so I
Speaker 2: meet with a couple of guys that are local guys
Speaker 2: who we started talking about starting a band. I really
Speaker 2: really started to get into the idea. I started writing
Speaker 2: a few more songs, and we put an ad out
Speaker 2: in the local jam magazine, which was like the regional
Speaker 2: you know, rock magazine for a drummer. I had met Brian,
Speaker 2: our bass player already, this guy John and Jay who
Speaker 2: are these two guitar players when we'd just gone to Berkeley,
Speaker 2: and Paul, who later again became my best friend, who
Speaker 2: was our drummer for twelve years, answered the ad and
Speaker 2: that was how Matchbox twenty we were tabbing the Secret
Speaker 2: at the time. And then that was like that was
Speaker 2: when we were the first like band where it was
Speaker 2: like we were doing gigs on the rag. We were
Speaker 2: playing regionally. We'd get the band and trailer and go
Speaker 2: play gigs in Tennessee and go play gigs in North
Speaker 2: Carolina and South Carolina. We had become like kind of
Speaker 2: the big local band, which doesn't mean a lot, It
Speaker 2: just means that like sometimes if like Hoody and the Blowfish,
Speaker 2: you know, they were just blowing up at the time,
Speaker 2: if they would come through town and didn't have an opener,
Speaker 2: we would be the band that they would get called
Speaker 2: to come in and open up. So we get to
Speaker 2: do it like we put like we opened for Ween
Speaker 2: one time, which is great, we opened for Cake like
Speaker 2: there's things great, you know, for us, and then that
Speaker 2: band imploded as bands due but luckily the three of
Speaker 2: us still me, Brian and Paul still kind of shared
Speaker 2: a vision. And then that's when I meet Matt Serlenik,
Speaker 2: who at the time it just had some success with
Speaker 2: Collective Soul and was looking for a new band. His
Speaker 2: brother went to college in Orlando, saw our band. Matt
Speaker 2: came to check us out. He signed me to a
Speaker 2: production deal, and then Atlantic Records wanted to sign me
Speaker 2: to deal through him, and I was a little scared
Speaker 2: to sign my own deal. So my only prerequisite was
Speaker 2: that I would do it, but I had to do
Speaker 2: it with Paul and Brian. So the three of us
Speaker 2: had a deal before we had a name, and then
Speaker 2: we uh, we signed. We signed the deal. We find
Speaker 2: we go in a search, We find these two guitar
Speaker 2: players that that we really like and we get along with.
Speaker 2: And then I it became very litigious this situation with
Speaker 2: the other two guitar players. I didn't understand copyrights, and
Speaker 2: so one of the guys in this band would take
Speaker 2: all these songs that I had written, draw up copyright
Speaker 2: forms and bring them in for us all to sign,
Speaker 2: and so I just would sign away, you know, three
Speaker 2: quarters to you know, to everybody else in the band.
Speaker 2: And so they were kind of holding those songs over
Speaker 2: me when I got the deal, and like, we're gonna
Speaker 2: sue you because these are our things. And and so
Speaker 2: the only thing I could think to do was I
Speaker 2: just wrote another record, so like and thank god, because
Speaker 2: that first record wasn't great. Like they always say that
Speaker 2: you have your whole life up to write your first
Speaker 2: record and that's why the second record is so hard.
Speaker 2: But in all honesty, Bob, I wrote my first record
Speaker 2: was my second record, and I had six months to
Speaker 2: write it. So we would just spend all of our
Speaker 2: time because we knew that we didn't have a lot
Speaker 2: of money to be in a studio, even though we
Speaker 2: had more than we thought, like we got like four
Speaker 2: hundred thousand dollars or something, you know, for the deal
Speaker 2: to go make the record. We spend it all almost
Speaker 2: all in the record in gear, but we wanted to
Speaker 2: be able to step in there, so we would spend
Speaker 2: hours every day in like a actual shed, shedding these
Speaker 2: songs so that we could play them live. I would
Speaker 2: write a new song, we'd bring it into the band.
Speaker 2: We would learn that song so we could play it
Speaker 2: off book like, you know, not spend too much time
Speaker 2: in the studio. And so by the time we went
Speaker 2: in the studio that that whole first yourself or someone
Speaker 2: like you was all written. And the only thing that
Speaker 2: I kept was three Am, just because that song meant
Speaker 2: a lot to me. And you know, it's funny is
Speaker 2: to this day like Pooky from Matchbox all them any
Speaker 2: proceeds he gets heat because he thinks it's ridiculous. He
Speaker 2: didn't write it. So any proceeds gets from three Am,
Speaker 2: he gives it to charity.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's go back. You signed a deal with Matt Surletic,
Speaker 1: yes or no?
Speaker 2: Yes, a production deal?
Speaker 1: Okay? Was that just you or was that the three
Speaker 1: of you?
Speaker 2: It was the three of us? It was all around
Speaker 2: the same time. So we signed with them. We signed
Speaker 2: with Atlantic Atlantic. It turns out, so Matt was going
Speaker 2: to produce the record. Atlantic Records wasn't as comfortable about
Speaker 2: giving these three guys from Florida four hundred thousand dollars,
Speaker 2: but they were more comfortable doing it through Matt Serletic
Speaker 2: and his production companies since they had, you know, a
Speaker 2: collective Soul was on Atlantic at the time, so they
Speaker 2: had already had some success with Matt. So that was
Speaker 2: where the production deal had come in. Was they weren't
Speaker 2: ready to secure a straight deal with US in Atlantic,
Speaker 2: but they were willing to do it as a production deal.
Speaker 1: Okay, Traditionally traditional production deal, you're signed to production company.
Speaker 1: Production makes a deal with Atlantic and they take a whack,
Speaker 1: so the act actually makes less. Is that what happened
Speaker 1: throughout your career.
Speaker 2: Up into a certain point, Like I mean, Matt still
Speaker 2: gets money whether he produces a record or not, that's
Speaker 2: always in the deal. But he found us, and then
Speaker 2: that's that we agreed. That's why you agree on those
Speaker 2: things early on, because you're hoping for the success, not
Speaker 2: that when the success comes later you're like, oh, we
Speaker 2: have to read you know. But you know, to Matt's credit,
Speaker 2: he did change his payment fee so that because it
Speaker 2: turns out like if we were splitting money and he
Speaker 2: was getting paid like on the gross, he would make
Speaker 2: more money than any individual member, right. And when we
Speaker 2: kind of sat and talked with him, because it man
Speaker 2: had him with us for many years. Matt restructured his
Speaker 2: deal so that he was just a six member and
Speaker 2: then everything we do would be equal. And that was
Speaker 2: fine because you know, we were and now this is
Speaker 2: the time, you know, we were playing live. We're making
Speaker 2: most of our money live and merchandising and publishing. That
Speaker 2: was money he wasn't seeing. So that was I thought
Speaker 2: that was really big of him.
Speaker 1: Okay, how about the publishing? Do you own all the publishing?
Speaker 2: I own what I haven't sold?
Speaker 1: Was that a little bit slower? When you made the
Speaker 1: deal with Matsroletic and ultimately Link, did you have to
Speaker 1: give up any publishing?
Speaker 2: No? None.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you own a one hundred percent of the public
Speaker 1: machine you have sold some of that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm now I've made a deal with Roundhill where
Speaker 2: I sold off like seventy percent. I still retain thirty
Speaker 2: because I still want to participate in success, you know.
Speaker 1: Okay, just to be clear, seventy percent of the songs
Speaker 1: or seventy percent of the record royalties are.
Speaker 2: Both just just the songwriting publishing part of it.
Speaker 1: How long would you make that deal?
Speaker 2: Right before COVID? I think so, I would say twenty
Speaker 2: nineteen to the twenty.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you're happy you made that deal five years later?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know, like I I was, I
Speaker 2: had been with you know, with with uh EMI for
Speaker 2: a really long time, and I start to find that,
Speaker 2: like as you know, as we get older and you
Speaker 2: fall out of favor a giant corporation like that, when
Speaker 2: they start thinking about songs for sak when they start
Speaker 2: thinking about the artists either at the top of their mind,
Speaker 2: I don't it's hard for you to be there anymore
Speaker 2: because they have the fresh and the new, you know,
Speaker 2: And so I thought it was a really good time
Speaker 2: for me to kind of be a part of a
Speaker 2: smaller family that was thinking about me a little bit more.
Speaker 2: And Evan Lamberg had already left and gone off to Universal,
Speaker 2: and Evan, you know, was my main reason for signing
Speaker 2: with EMI in the first place. So it you know,
Speaker 2: it was an easy decision to make. Even though the
Speaker 2: EMI guys, which later on became EMI Sony, they've always
Speaker 2: been amazing. So what you do with the money, I
Speaker 2: don't have to tell you that.
Speaker 1: You have to tell me anything.
Speaker 2: No, I mean, I listen, I've I've my wife and
Speaker 2: I we were we're really well invested. We we were
Speaker 2: not crazy spenders. We're not we don't take a lot
Speaker 2: of risks are investing. You know, we've we've managed to
Speaker 2: maintain and grow everything really really well. So you know,
Speaker 2: like it's we're not I'm never really I never thought
Speaker 2: about money as the means to own anything. It was
Speaker 2: always like money was a means for experiences, you know,
Speaker 2: like I would I would. I love being able to
Speaker 2: take vacations with my family and take people out. I
Speaker 2: love being able to go to nice dinners and bring
Speaker 2: everybody together and have this moment. But I don't really
Speaker 2: need to own very much. You know, we have a
Speaker 2: nice house, we have a nice car in the garage.
Speaker 2: That's we're good, you know where we need to be.
Speaker 2: I don't like, I don't mean much status symbol.
Speaker 1: Well, let me put it a different way. You get
Speaker 1: a big check, did you buy anything or you just
Speaker 1: invest all of it?
Speaker 2: No, I just it just went back in the pile
Speaker 2: with the rest. I mean, I already I've already been
Speaker 2: like we'd already done been doing really really well. This
Speaker 2: was just a it was just kind of one of
Speaker 2: those things of like, well let's let's look at the
Speaker 2: landscape of music. Let's let's start to understand the power
Speaker 2: of your catalog back when, but even just when you
Speaker 2: could when the greatest hits made sense, right, which you
Speaker 2: know now the greatest hits is it doesn't exist anymore
Speaker 2: because I can get your greatest hits. I can just
Speaker 2: go on Spotify and I make your greatest hits, which
Speaker 2: every way I want to, I can find everything that's
Speaker 2: out there. The the value is probably you know, it
Speaker 2: still exists in sync and things like that. But for
Speaker 2: that for that stuff to be valuable, people need to
Speaker 2: be working it and people need to you know, to
Speaker 2: be actively working on your catalog. And so that to
Speaker 2: me was I think was the reason, Like it just
Speaker 2: doesn't have the value the ownership of it. The songs
Speaker 2: are still there, and that connection that I have every night,
Speaker 2: like we're gonna have a show at the Prudential Center Thursday,
Speaker 2: that connection is still going to be there. That doesn't
Speaker 2: go away. And that's the one you know, that I
Speaker 2: own forever. There's not really more that I have the
Speaker 2: benefit from from owning that publishing, and I think a
Speaker 2: lot of artists are starting to realize that now as well.
Speaker 2: You hear about these maze you know, people like Springsteen, you.
Speaker 1: Know, right, so your songs round he'll own seventy percent.
Speaker 1: Is there anything you say that they can't do with them?
Speaker 2: I have? Yeah. I have the complete right to say
Speaker 2: no to any like if they want to use it
Speaker 2: in some way that I don't want. I have the
Speaker 2: complete say over how they get used.
Speaker 1: Just generally speaking, what would you say no to?
Speaker 2: The first thing that popping in mind would probably be
Speaker 2: something political that I don't agree with, like that, you know,
Speaker 2: that would be a problem for me. You know, maybe
Speaker 2: certain uh, pharmaceutical you know, commercials, maybe that I don't
Speaker 2: officially totally agree with. You just you never know when
Speaker 2: just something's going to be like I do. I don't
Speaker 2: like that look for me, you know, Like I'm not
Speaker 2: like Carlos and I always joke like we're not we're
Speaker 2: not ready for Smooth to be an x Lax commercial
Speaker 2: just yet, like we gotta we gotta call once where
Speaker 2: it was like it was a commercial for Smooth and
Speaker 2: it was like a Mercedes commercial, but it was kind
Speaker 2: of like the Vibe where the guys listening to Smooth
Speaker 2: and then the hot girl goes by and listening to
Speaker 2: Maria Cabo or whatever, you know, and and we're like, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: like that's you know, that's that's We're not ready to
Speaker 2: put that nail in that coffin just yet. You know,
Speaker 2: we're still we're still trying to keep the illusional. But
Speaker 2: the third time, when smooth comes back around, you know,
Speaker 2: and it's cool again.
Speaker 1: How'd you hook up with Michael Lipman who's on the
Speaker 1: West Coast.
Speaker 2: He was managing Macheletic because he managed his producers at
Speaker 2: the time as well. Michael had had a lot of success,
Speaker 2: but the only thing that he had never done was
Speaker 2: take a band from zero. He never had a brand
Speaker 2: new band, and that was just something he always wanted
Speaker 2: to do, and so he took us on as that project.
Speaker 2: He honestly, it was so similar in everything that we did.
Speaker 2: He came to see us the first time he ever
Speaker 2: saw us play live, walked backstage and said, well, how
Speaker 2: much money did you get from your publishing And I said, well,
Speaker 2: I think I got about four hundred thousand. He goes,
Speaker 2: My advice to you is put that money away and invested,
Speaker 2: because it's all the money you're ever going to see.
Speaker 2: If this is how you think a show should be played.
Speaker 2: And then he quit and he walked out of the room.
Speaker 2: And then and then we called him and begged them
Speaker 2: to come back. And then I think like a week
Speaker 2: later he I got into a fight because he I
Speaker 2: just didn't think that it mattered what clothes you wore
Speaker 2: in a video. I was like, nobody cares about what
Speaker 2: they you know, you wear, and Mike was like, last night,
Speaker 2: He's like, he tell me always the story, Like, you know,
Speaker 2: you know Bruce Springsteen. You think that Bruce Springstein just
Speaker 2: wears any jeans and any T shirt. He's like, you
Speaker 2: don't think that he's got the exact right teams and
Speaker 2: the exact you know is the trust me. Everybody cares.
Speaker 2: It just depends on how you show it, you know.
Speaker 2: And I remember walking out of the restaurant fucking you,
Speaker 2: fuck you. You know. We quit on each other quite
Speaker 2: a few times. But he's been very much a paternal
Speaker 2: figure throughout my entire life.
Speaker 1: Okay. What I remember was, especially in LA, there ended
Speaker 1: up being an acoustic version of Push, which they played
Speaker 1: in a top forty on the FM station. Was that
Speaker 1: an anomaly? Although there are you know, once Napster hit,
Speaker 1: there were a million versions now on YouTube. Is that
Speaker 1: a factor in the success of Push, the acoustic version?
Speaker 2: No, no, no, it was a product of it Push.
Speaker 2: I mean the reason why Push was a success is
Speaker 2: because it was nineteen ninety six ninety seven and Dave Rossi,
Speaker 2: who ran I think the edge in Birmingham, Like it
Speaker 2: was at a time where if you're a programmed director
Speaker 2: of a record of a radio station, you could play
Speaker 2: something because you liked it. You know, there wasn't like
Speaker 2: a formatted you know, you weren't part of a conglomerate.
Speaker 2: It wasn't formatted what you needed to play. And he
Speaker 2: on his own, like we put that long day, the
Speaker 2: label put money into it, we made a video, it
Speaker 2: was on MTV. The song just tanked, it didn't do well,
Speaker 2: and Dave Rossi just started playing Push on his own
Speaker 2: and in Birmingham it became the number one song. Like
Speaker 2: we were playing everywhere to like moderate people. And then
Speaker 2: we showed up Birmingham. There's a line around the block
Speaker 2: to see us play. And Atlantic was we were on
Speaker 2: the chopping block to begin with, because the day our
Speaker 2: record came out was the day lava folded into it. Atlantic.
Speaker 2: It was Jason and Atlantic took Jason Flohm into Atlantic,
Speaker 2: and they absolved just a couple of bands. It was
Speaker 2: like Us, Sugar, Ray, Kid Rock and Edwin McCain. I
Speaker 2: want to say I like the bands that they kept,
Speaker 2: but we all knew that we were on the chopping block,
Speaker 2: and so when long they didn't work out, it was like, oh,
Speaker 2: like we were just waiting for the call any day,
Speaker 2: and because of Push, they were like, let's let's just
Speaker 2: give this single a chance. And then everything from that
Speaker 2: moment on was just exponentially. Every week we just started
Speaker 2: to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
Speaker 1: Okay, you had success and it was Matchbox with the
Speaker 1: number two. Oh and then it was changed to spelled
Speaker 1: twe n t y. What was that about?
Speaker 2: Paul? I just liked the way it looked better, Like
Speaker 2: it was funny that we weren't. I think Michael made
Speaker 2: more of a deal of it than and like put
Speaker 2: out like a release and all this stuff like that
Speaker 2: wasn't anything that we did. Michael was just always trying
Speaker 2: to find a way to get somebody to write about us,
Speaker 2: you know, and like I remember like seeing that, like
Speaker 2: I guess in Touch magazine or in Style whatever, they
Speaker 2: would always have like a loser of the week, and
Speaker 2: we were the loser of the week because we we
Speaker 2: made a joke that we thought was clearly a joke
Speaker 2: that we were we were so tired of being compared
Speaker 2: to bands like Some forty one and Blink one eighty two,
Speaker 2: which was so obvious we'd never have in our entire life.
Speaker 2: And so I guess whoever heard that rote like as
Speaker 2: if da da da da da, and we're just like, oh,
Speaker 2: you have no sense of humor at all, you know,
Speaker 2: you don't get us at all. So yeah, it was
Speaker 2: that was an aesthetic choice, just purely an aesthetic choice.
Speaker 2: And we and we still keep it. We just like
Speaker 2: the way it looks better. We like twenty written out,
Speaker 2: and we like it in a lowercase bawd. That's just
Speaker 2: the kind of people we are.
Speaker 1: Okay, tell me. The story behind Push Push.
Speaker 2: Was just a song about manipulation, you know, about power
Speaker 2: in a relationship, about how people can use you know,
Speaker 2: the fact that they know that someone loves you and
Speaker 2: they can use that to manipulate you, and how sometimes
Speaker 2: you get so used to it that you can mistake
Speaker 2: that for love. Sometimes. It was written about a situation
Speaker 2: that I was in at the time where I was
Speaker 2: the I feel like I was, you know, the one.
Speaker 2: But I also didn't feel like anybody wanted to hear
Speaker 2: a song with a guy bellowing about being a victim.
Speaker 2: So it was kind of like written as a third
Speaker 2: third party, you know, like she said, I don't know
Speaker 2: if you know it's fact. It was almost like a
Speaker 2: fly on the wall of me looking at this relationship,
Speaker 2: you know, And there was a little blowback I think
Speaker 2: at the time. I mean, it was a pretty aggressive
Speaker 2: I think in that kind of nineties manufactured angst kind
Speaker 2: of way that a lot of us were, you know,
Speaker 2: it was in that kind of like well this is
Speaker 2: how we expressed ourselves. No no, no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 2: But it was genuine, you know, like it came from
Speaker 2: a real place in melody and lyric wise, and it
Speaker 2: scratched that it's at the time, it's it's a I mean,
Speaker 2: obviously for so many reasons, it's been a really important song.
Speaker 2: It's an amazing thing now to see, you know, fourteen
Speaker 2: and fifteen year olds like kind of light up when
Speaker 2: we play it at a show, maybe partially because of Barbie.
Speaker 1: You know, what was the real situation that inspired the song.
Speaker 2: Uh. I mean I think that you know, if you're
Speaker 2: if you were me at that time, and like you
Speaker 2: your prospects were potential, right like, if this whole thing
Speaker 2: that you're working on works out, within the sky's the limit.
Speaker 2: But chances are, like everybody likes to tell you it's
Speaker 2: not going to you know, because it doesn't. You know,
Speaker 2: it doesn't work out ninety percent of the time, and
Speaker 2: so you know, if it hadn't worked out, I would
Speaker 2: be the guy just living on my friends couches. So
Speaker 2: any relationship that I was in, I didn't have a
Speaker 2: whole lot of control over it, you know. I was
Speaker 2: always just kind of being led by my emotions and
Speaker 2: just lucky if somebody felt like somebody liked me and
Speaker 2: wanted to spend time with me, and so that would
Speaker 2: always put me in a position where I could be
Speaker 2: manipulated very very easily or discarded, you know, because I
Speaker 2: didn't really I didn't. I wasn't someone that I think
Speaker 2: that I wasn't so many that people took like a
Speaker 2: serious person.
Speaker 1: You know, you wrote the first album very quickly because
Speaker 1: you discarded the songs with a previous band. How much
Speaker 1: pressure did you feel on the follow up album.
Speaker 2: Uh, you know at first none. I mean I think
Speaker 2: you know the whole idea when you're young and you're
Speaker 2: doing something like this, it's that native atay, right, it's
Speaker 2: the what you don't know or you don't realize it
Speaker 2: actually gives you the strength to kind of go like,
Speaker 2: of course I'm gonna make it. You got to have
Speaker 2: you have to have a little bit of narcissism because
Speaker 2: you have to believe that other people should listen to
Speaker 2: what it is you have to say. And you have
Speaker 2: to like suspend disbelief to some degree because you have
Speaker 2: to believe against all odds that you're you're going to
Speaker 2: be the one of the ones that make it. Of
Speaker 2: course you are. When the first record, though, did so well,
Speaker 2: it worked the opposite way because when you get that
Speaker 2: kind of success right off the bat, everybody is like, well,
Speaker 2: that's not going to happen, and it doesn't. I mean,
Speaker 2: they're right, you're not going to sell twenty million records
Speaker 2: again and fifteen million records again. But it's pretty much
Speaker 2: a guarantee that oh that's a you know, if not
Speaker 2: a one hit wonder, that's a one record you know
Speaker 2: moment and that was that time in the nineties. There's
Speaker 2: a lot of bands selling ten million records. Back then,
Speaker 2: the presidents of the United States of America just on
Speaker 2: Lump and Peaches sold ten million records, you know. And
Speaker 2: then so everybody would like to let you know, it's
Speaker 2: probably not going to happen. So then you're like, oh, well, shit,
Speaker 2: maybe it's not gonna happen. I knew that I was
Speaker 2: writing some really good stuff. I had already written Bent.
Speaker 2: I knew that Bent, you know it was a good song.
Speaker 2: I knew that if You're Gone was a good I
Speaker 2: knew that these songs were solid. I also knew that
Speaker 2: that didn't necessarily matter. I think that magic moment of
Speaker 2: smooth right in the middle was a huge thing that
Speaker 2: kind of kept people's eyes on, well, let's give it
Speaker 2: a chance and see what happens. And then so then
Speaker 2: we're at the very beginning of the early odds. We
Speaker 2: put out our first single on the second record, and
Speaker 2: it's our first number one hit, like our first actual
Speaker 2: number one song, and that felt good. And then that
Speaker 2: record did amazingly well for especially for that that being
Speaker 2: in that situation as sophomore record and going, ah, you know,
Speaker 2: four singles deep in there. That was the moment where
Speaker 2: I kind of felt like we really started to build
Speaker 2: a career. You know, like if you on your first
Speaker 2: you have some success on your first record. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's that's a journey, that's an adventure, and it buys
Speaker 2: you a ticket to get in to see how you
Speaker 2: could if you can take the ride, and then you
Speaker 2: get on the ride, and then you know, we didn't
Speaker 2: throw up. You know, we held it together, We mastered
Speaker 2: the ride, and by the time we got into our
Speaker 2: third record, we were the band that we wanted to be.
Speaker 2: Like that third record with bride lights and unwell and
Speaker 2: sounds like so sad, so like that was like all
Speaker 2: we felt like, this is this really feels like we've
Speaker 2: kind of settled into the adult versions of the band
Speaker 2: that we want to be and we were allowed that.
Speaker 2: We were allowed allowed to do that, by the way,
Speaker 2: which is you know, it doesn't you're not always lucky
Speaker 2: enough to you know, a lot of bands find their stride,
Speaker 2: you know, three four records in, but they don't get
Speaker 2: that opportunity to now as much as they used to then.
Speaker 2: So we're really really fortunate because even then, I mean
Speaker 2: then wasn't now, But without that success that would have happened,
Speaker 2: we would have been dropped probably what you know, if
Speaker 2: Push had never happened, we would have been dropped and
Speaker 2: never really gotten to figure out what our true potential was.
Speaker 1: Now, eventually the landscape changes completely, but the hits are
Speaker 1: not as many at number? How does that feel? How
Speaker 1: do you cope with that? Emotionally fine?
Speaker 2: I mean, we're it's it doesn't take a genius to realize,
Speaker 2: like there's a moment where we're still doing well. Third record,
Speaker 2: we're still doing well, and we don't sound like everything
Speaker 2: else that's on the radio around us. Like if you
Speaker 2: look at a screenshot, it's like Nelly, you know, it's
Speaker 2: a bunch of like Southern rabbits and then unwell, as
Speaker 2: you know, it's kind of in there. But you don't
Speaker 2: have to be a genius to to listen to music
Speaker 2: and go like, oh, well, this isn't what we're doing,
Speaker 2: you know, like this this is not this aesthetic like
Speaker 2: we give part of it, you know, having talent, having
Speaker 2: good songs has to be it. But also for some
Speaker 2: sort of success, your aesthetic has to fit the aesthetic
Speaker 2: of what kind of what's happening right then in the zeitgeist,
Speaker 2: and that was something that happened for us at that
Speaker 2: time when it went over like we we didn't. Also,
Speaker 2: we didn't love everything those popular, so we were kind
Speaker 2: of glad that we didn't sound like that, and we
Speaker 2: weren't going to go chasing that sound. And so I
Speaker 2: think one of the things that we did early on
Speaker 2: was we we were very very conscious of trying not
Speaker 2: to sound anything like what was happening on the radio,
Speaker 2: but also not sound like our previous records, and realized
Speaker 2: that at this point we'd love it if you know,
Speaker 2: if you can if you have some success on the radio.
Speaker 2: But we had massed a group of people who had
Speaker 2: an interest in what it is. We had to say,
Speaker 2: you know, let's just let's tend to that garden all
Speaker 2: the time. Let's make sure that we keep these people
Speaker 2: to good with us. And over the years, those people
Speaker 2: have brought their kids, and their kids are bringing their kids.
Speaker 2: And I mean when we were really, really young, if
Speaker 2: you would have told us at the very very beginning,
Speaker 2: when we were super hungry, that you know, eventually you're
Speaker 2: going to have a career, but it's going to come
Speaker 2: along with a sense of nostalgia. We would have thought
Speaker 2: that was sad, and then we realized that, like, you know,
Speaker 2: that's that is ninety percent of the favorite music and
Speaker 2: bands that we've grown up with that have a career
Speaker 2: to this day. There you know, so many bands out there,
Speaker 2: there are still they go out on tour, they're still
Speaker 2: selling ten thousand seats, They're still enjoying a really good life.
Speaker 2: Their songs are being place to put you know what
Speaker 2: I mean. They're just not a part of this immediate
Speaker 2: conversation anymore. And almost nobody, I mean you have. I
Speaker 2: call them the one percent, you know, these beyonces, these
Speaker 2: tailors that are usually successful, and every time they do something,
Speaker 2: they maintain a part of that conversation, right, And that
Speaker 2: seems tiring. It seems like it takes an entire village
Speaker 2: to make that happen, you know, and it certainly doesn't
Speaker 2: sound like something that happens by doing the thing that
Speaker 2: I love, which is sitting in my studio writing and
Speaker 2: writing until I get a song that really excites me,
Speaker 2: following that thread, making that into a record like that,
Speaker 2: to me is the thing that I love about it.
Speaker 2: And that's how I wound up getting to where I
Speaker 2: got to. It's just that no matter what I do, like,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to be that part of that conversation anymore.
Speaker 2: And that's okay. In fact, I don't even know what
Speaker 2: it would be like, because that conversation now is happening
Speaker 2: on such a broader, wider level, Like you know, I
Speaker 2: think about it like how we used to. We used
Speaker 2: to have this point of entrigue when you put out
Speaker 2: a record of music that was kind of like a funnel,
Speaker 2: and you and your label and your team would get
Speaker 2: together and you'd be like, well, we're gonna release this
Speaker 2: song at this time on this place, and then we're
Speaker 2: gonna put it out everywhere, and you have control over
Speaker 2: every little aspect, you know. And it was so even
Speaker 2: when you you were like really really famous, you were
Speaker 2: in a smaller playing field. Like what you and I
Speaker 2: talked about earlier in this conversation was a much smaller
Speaker 2: playing field that was out there. Now that that funnel
Speaker 2: is a callnder and you put something in it and
Speaker 2: it just goes where it goes and it comes in
Speaker 2: and you don't have really I don't know what. I
Speaker 2: don't know what it's like to be famous. I know,
Speaker 2: what it's like to have some famous music. I know
Speaker 2: what it's like to be famous in the room that
Speaker 2: I rented, you know, I know what it's famous to
Speaker 2: be like to be famous in front of that twenty
Speaker 2: thousand people that came to see me do this thing.
Speaker 2: But I don't know what it's like to be famous
Speaker 2: in that sense where like my life is scrutinized this whole,
Speaker 2: you know, like it's your brand. Somebody the other day
Speaker 2: was like, why don't you have sneakers with the name
Speaker 2: on because I'm not sneaker famous, motherfucker. Like that's not
Speaker 2: something you just do, you know, you just side and
Speaker 2: I'm mak a sneakers, I'm a name on them.
Speaker 1: Let's switch gears. It's the twenty fiftheen verse we of Smooth.
Speaker 1: According to Billboard, it's the third most played song in history,
Speaker 1: after Blinding Lights by the Weekend and The Twists by
Speaker 1: Chubby Checker. He started to tell the story, tell the
Speaker 1: story now, how smooth came to.
Speaker 2: Be well, first of a fucking good for the Weekend, right, Like,
Speaker 2: just jump right up there pretty damn quick. I you know,
Speaker 2: originally I was just supposed to write smooth. I wasn't
Speaker 2: going to be a singer on it. I just sang
Speaker 2: on the demo and I was even in Carla in
Speaker 2: Clive's office having the conversations about who was going to
Speaker 2: sing it. You know, we flirted around. I flirted around
Speaker 2: George Michael. I really wanted George to do it. I
Speaker 2: think bon Jovi's name came up at some point and
Speaker 2: it was Carlos, who had no idea who I was,
Speaker 2: but liked my voice on the demo. That was like, well,
Speaker 2: let's does he sing? And they're like, yeah, he's in
Speaker 2: a band, you know, and it call us a like
Speaker 2: He's like, I I believe him, Let's just have him
Speaker 2: do it. And then that was kind of it. I Mean,
Speaker 2: the funniest part of that whole thing is the twenty
Speaker 2: five years later now, you know, I'll still have nights
Speaker 2: till midnight where my wife's laughing because me and Carlos
Speaker 2: are still up texting each other, you know, stupid videos
Speaker 2: and songs and you know, fucking strange emojis and making
Speaker 2: plans to to do things that you know, records that
Speaker 2: were never gonna make. He's just become like one of
Speaker 2: my like one of my brothers. And in the relationship
Speaker 2: that I've wound up with with Clive Davis, who is
Speaker 2: my neighbor. But you know, Clive is like, if I
Speaker 2: make a new record, I've never I've never been on
Speaker 2: his label, never had anything to do with him, but
Speaker 2: he had me help honor him at Carnegie Hall about
Speaker 2: a month ago. If I make a new record, I
Speaker 2: go to client's house or his office and we sit
Speaker 2: and we listen to the record, you know, together. Like
Speaker 2: He's just been a real great mentor that I met
Speaker 2: at a time where I was much more porous than
Speaker 2: I probably am now and much more spongy, and so
Speaker 2: I you know, it was a really good time to
Speaker 2: meet those people in my life because I learned from
Speaker 2: Carlos early on the difference between being a famous musician
Speaker 2: and being a celebrity, and that being a famous musician
Speaker 2: is what you've always wanted. I want people to hear
Speaker 2: my music. I want more people to hear it. I want,
Speaker 2: you know, I want my song to be part of
Speaker 2: people's lives, and the way that my favorite music is
Speaker 2: a part of mine. And then the rest of it
Speaker 2: is all bullshit, like none of it really matters except
Speaker 2: for that.
Speaker 1: Okay, the band Matchbox twenty made a number of records.
Speaker 1: You've made solo records, You've gone on tour solo, You've
Speaker 1: gone with Matchbox twenty live. What does the future hold?
Speaker 2: I mean, right now I can only see right in
Speaker 2: front of my face. So next year is the twentieth
Speaker 2: anniversary of my first solo record, So I am just finishing,
Speaker 2: just finishing the writing, and we're deep into the recording
Speaker 2: of a new solo record. And then the very next
Speaker 2: year is the thirtieth anniversary of the first Matchbox twenty record,
Speaker 2: and we're trying to figure out what that means for us.
Speaker 2: We want to do something. We just toured last summer,
Speaker 2: which because I think because we hadn't been out in
Speaker 2: so many years, we hadn't been out since like twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2: I think it was one of our most successful tours
Speaker 2: in our entire career since the very very beginning. So
Speaker 2: the idea of like but we also made a record
Speaker 2: which we were planning on doing, but then COVID happened
Speaker 2: and we canceled a summer and we're like, well, if
Speaker 2: we're not going to tour, but we know that we're available,
Speaker 2: let's make a record. And we made a record that
Speaker 2: we're unbelievably proud of. But we also realized that we
Speaker 2: fucking hate making records together. Like it is just like
Speaker 2: a one giant argument. Like we as a band and
Speaker 2: get along unbelievable. Like if you come out you see
Speaker 2: us at a show, you would think that we all
Speaker 2: just became best friends, you know what I mean, Like
Speaker 2: we are this family. We're joking all the time. I
Speaker 2: don't think we've ever had a personal argument amongst us. Ever,
Speaker 2: it's always about creative direction. It's always about this will
Speaker 2: I see something this way and I see it this way?
Speaker 2: And you know, Paul always jokes that a Matchbox twenty
Speaker 2: song is the result of an argument between four people.
Speaker 2: And so I don't know, as we get older, that's
Speaker 2: something that we I mean, I'm not saying we wouldn't
Speaker 2: never record music, but we're not making an entire record again.
Speaker 2: Doesn't seem in the cards for us because we don't
Speaker 2: enjoy it. And frankly, we've worked hard enough in a
Speaker 2: teeth enough now where we don't have to do something
Speaker 2: if we don't enjoy it. But we enjoy playing, So
Speaker 2: I mean, maybe we'll maybe, you know, the landscape is different.
Speaker 2: Maybe for Matchbox that means we've put out a song
Speaker 2: and we just go out and tour maybe something special,
Speaker 2: maybe your residency at a casino, you know, maybe a
Speaker 2: specialty tour where it's just like one big show in
Speaker 2: big cities, you know, event shows. Like I don't know
Speaker 2: what that means yet, but right now I know that
Speaker 2: I just got to get this fucking record done by
Speaker 2: the end of this year. For my solo that's like,
Speaker 2: you know, like at the end of the day, you're
Speaker 2: still jobbing, you know, like you're still like, Okay, I've
Speaker 2: got this. I've given myself a deadline, and now I'm
Speaker 2: going to make that deadline happen because now Atlantic Records
Speaker 2: is going I want that record, and I'm lucky to
Speaker 2: you know, still have a label that wants that record.
Speaker 1: So okay, one final thing, it is almost impossible to
Speaker 1: make it. Luck definitely plays a factor. Hard work pays
Speaker 1: a factor, plays a factor with me. But in order
Speaker 1: to make it, you need to need it. You have
Speaker 1: to have this inner drive. To what degree is that
Speaker 1: a characteristic of yours?
Speaker 2: I think because like making it has changed over the years,
Speaker 2: you know, like we just talked about but I think
Speaker 2: I want to still feel to myself like I'm writing
Speaker 2: the best work that I can write right now. You know,
Speaker 2: like everything that I've done up until now, I can
Speaker 2: look back on it now and go like, oh, I
Speaker 2: would have changed this or would have done this. But
Speaker 2: I know in my heart that each one of those
Speaker 2: groups of songs I made the best record I could.
Speaker 2: I wrote the best songs that I could at that time.
Speaker 2: That's really my driving force now is I want to
Speaker 2: I want to write songs. I would love for people
Speaker 2: to connect with them, you know. I mean I love
Speaker 2: when I write a song and it's still something that
Speaker 2: somebody uses that they're their wedding or it's still something
Speaker 2: you know. But that's really the only success now because
Speaker 2: you never really know for the rest of our lives
Speaker 2: and my life, I can we can go out and
Speaker 2: play to shows. We can get people that are going
Speaker 2: to come see us play. Most of my favorite artists,
Speaker 2: you know, like like sometimes you're playing it, you know,
Speaker 2: you're playing like this casino and you're like are we casinos?
Speaker 2: And you look up like, oh, well, fuck, Elvis Costello
Speaker 2: was here last week. Fucking love Alice Costello and you
Speaker 2: know John legend was just here last you know, like,
Speaker 2: all right, you know this is I'm not the I
Speaker 2: think the the litmus test isn't isn't that anymore? Now?
Speaker 2: It's just like I just want to do good work.
Speaker 2: I just want to write, you know, I just want
Speaker 2: to write good songs, and I want to do well
Speaker 2: enough that I keep getting to do that. Like I
Speaker 2: guess one day if like I don't have a label,
Speaker 2: I don't know, Like, I'll tell you this, if for
Speaker 2: some reason, music stops being a viable career option for me,
Speaker 2: you will never see me again. I won't be on
Speaker 2: Dancing with the Stars, I won't be on you know,
Speaker 2: celebrity houseboat or fucking whatever. You know, like, I will
Speaker 2: not find another means for people to know who I am.
Speaker 2: If people stop knowing who I am because I make music, well,
Speaker 2: then lucky for them, they will never see me again.
Speaker 2: I will just be I'll just be quietly rich somewhere else.
Speaker 1: Okay, but that's that's now. Go back to the beginning.
Speaker 1: You're a high school drop out, You're.
Speaker 2: Playing in it was everything. If I don't make it,
Speaker 2: I don't survive like it was. And it's still it's
Speaker 2: easy for me on this side of the fence to
Speaker 2: tell somebody, you know, listen, if you're tenacious, dreams are
Speaker 2: gonna happen. You just have to stick with it. But
Speaker 2: that's not always true. And the fact is, without the
Speaker 2: luck factor, Like I believe that I write good songs,
Speaker 2: and I believe that I worked my ass off, and
Speaker 2: I believe that Matchbox twenty is, in my opinion, one
Speaker 2: of the greatest pop rock bands of all time, especially
Speaker 2: if you come see us live. But there's a lot
Speaker 2: of great fucking bands, and there's a lot of great songs,
Speaker 2: and there's a lot of people that with all of
Speaker 2: those things, they just didn't have that one lucky component,
Speaker 2: you know. And so you're still like, I could be
Speaker 2: fifty two years old having a conversation about my you know,
Speaker 2: my dad band that I'm in while I'm sleeping on
Speaker 2: my friend's couch, or you know, taking time for my
Speaker 2: dentistry practice or whatever, only I didn't even give. I
Speaker 2: didn't have a fallback, man, I like, you know, I
Speaker 2: didn't even have the dentistry practice to fall back on.
Speaker 2: I would have been working at my cousin's cleaners, you know,
Speaker 2: while I was still trying to get my band to
Speaker 2: work out. And it's never lost on me that it's
Speaker 2: a very fine line and that luck is that line
Speaker 2: between that happening. But the drive is just that you
Speaker 2: let everything else go, You let college go, you let
Speaker 2: getting into the ground floor of a career go. All
Speaker 2: of these other options are kind of going by, and
Speaker 2: you're like, no, I'm waiting on this. I'm waiting. It's
Speaker 2: kind of like you're just you're sitting at the at
Speaker 2: the bus stop and waiting for your friend to pick
Speaker 2: you up, and all of these buses come by and
Speaker 2: you're just like, no, I'm good, he'll come. He'll come,
Speaker 2: and you're just like, oh fuck, if he doesn't come home,
Speaker 2: I'm stranded, you know. And then for us, we just
Speaker 2: got lucky and he showed up and picked us up,
Speaker 2: and you know, we went on the ride.
Speaker 1: Needless to say, your dream came true. Rob, Thanks so
Speaker 1: much for taking the time to tell your story to
Speaker 1: my audience.
Speaker 2: It's a pleasure, Bob. I've been reading you for years
Speaker 2: and years and it is an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1: To that's great talking to you. Obviously, you'll see him
Speaker 1: on the road in some incarnation, coming fast, and of
Speaker 1: course you'll hear Smooth in your grocery store, on the radio.
Speaker 2: Kahoon, and in your nightmares till next time.
Speaker 1: This is Bob left side.