Rob Thomas will release his new solo album All Night Days on Sept. 5. It’s his first non-Christmas solo album since 2019, and he says you can blame the COVID-19 lockdown for messing up his nice, neat schedule.
Generally, Rob says, there’s a “nice ebb and flow” to his career: He makes a Matchbox Twenty record and then does a solo album. But COVID forced the two projects to spill into each other.
“I started [this record] basically in 2020 when we were still all locked down … and we weren’t going to do a Matchbox record. We were just going to tour,” he tells ABC Audio. “And then after … the third postponement [of the tour,], we decided, ‘Well, we should make a record.’ And then I put my record kinda on the back burner.”
The result was the 2023 Matchbox record Where the Light Goes. “Three songs that would have been on this record wound up on the Matchbox record,” Rob explains. “And then three songs that would’ve been on the Matchbox record made their way onto this record. So they just kind of replaced each other out.”
The unexpected Matchbox record and the subsequent tour put him back several years, and he realized he had to put out his solo record before 2026, because that’s when he and Matchbox will regroup to mark their 30th anniversary.
“I’ve been making this record for five years … I wanted to make sure that I gave it its due and I got to put out a record of these songs … because I worked hard on them and I think that they’re worth listening to,” he notes.
“But then I wanted get out of the way by the time Matchbox came back in, because that’s a much bigger animal.”
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