“I’ve known some of these songs all of my adult life, and I don’t feel I particularly need to hear them again, but when you go out there and play the songs and hear them through the ears of everyone else in the room—and share in the experiences people have lived with those songs—all of that goes away. You just go with it. It’s fun and you get to selfishly hold onto your youth a little bit,” Matchbox Twenty guitarist and drummer, Paul Doucette, told me on the phone on a recent morning.
Originally formed in Orlando, Florida in 1995, Matchbox Twenty rose to fame with the release of their first album “Yourself or Someone Like You”. Now comprised of Rob Thomas, Brian Yale, Paul Doucette, and Kyle Cook, the band is well-known for recognizable hits like “3AM”, “Push”, and “Unwell”, songs which many of us have grown up with both in our CD players and on the radio—that still get airplay today. Despite not having made an album since 2017 and a long touring hiatus due to Covid-19 cancellations, the band is back together again with a brand new album titled “Where the Light Goes”, and these days it seems they’re feeling lighter than ever.
“There’s a song on the record called “Where the Light Goes”, and when we had first started talking about making new music, it was one of the first songs that came around. Rob wrote it and played it for us, and it felt very much like if you wrote down “what does Matchbox Twenty sound like?”…it would be that song. So it always felt like a good place to start from,” said Paul about the record title.
When asked about the positive, upbeat, and nostalgic undertones of the album’s single “Wild Dogs (Running in a Slow Dream”, Paul insisted that while they weren’t shying away from the challenging aspects of life, he and vocalist Rob Thomas realized early on that they were excited to create something inherently positive in messaging.
“This time, we were making something that felt more uplifting. We didn’t want to bring something negative into the world. We’re older, so we’re definitely touching on what it’s like to be older, to look back at youth in a nostalgic or forgiving way—maybe you didn’t accomplish everything you wanted to accomplish when you were young, and you can either hold yourself to that or accept it and move on. So we sort of touched on a lot of those things but in a way that gave them hope,” he continued, “There’s a sense now of “we’ve never been more connected but less together” and there’s kind of been an uptick of ‘anger porn’. Everyone is just mad, and I think that the pandemic partially spurred that along. I do think that has been there from 2016 and even before, and it’s been brewing for such a long time. But we don’t have to do that, we don’t have to live in that kind of thought process, and for this album, we just didn’t want to.”
While concert-goers will get to hear a slew of brand-new tracks from the upcoming album, long-time fans looking to hear the hits will definitely not be disappointed.
“We fully understand that when we put this tour on sale that we were going to come out and play a lot of the old songs, and we’re going to play songs we haven’t heard in a long time,” Paul told me, “We’re also going to play a couple of our new songs and we hope that those can become songs people want to hear on the next tour.”
Matchbox Twenty will perform with The Wallflowers in the Pacific Northwest tonight, Friday, May 19 at 7:30 p.m. at RV Inn Styles Resorts Amphitheater. Tickets for the ‘Slow Dream’ tour are available at a variety of price points starting at only $35 per seat. Through a special arrangement, if you are purchasing tickets for the first time through Vivid Seats, use our special discount promo code “Oregon20″ at checkout to save $20 on orders of $200 or more for the event you plan on attending. You can also purchase directly from the band’s website.
Continue reading below for the full interview with Matchbox Twenty’s Paul Doucette as he talks reuniting with the band, working in television and film scoring, thoughts on AI, and how the practice of letting go has impacted both his art and personal life.
Q: This is your first album in a long time. What was the catalyst for coming together and doing this project, and what are your feelings about it?
A: We were originally slated just to tour, but it got canceled in 2020 and 2021. In 2022, not everyone was ready to go out. We talked about the fact that we were maybe letting people down at this point, and there was some talk about doing a song or two prior to postponing the 2022 tour to promote the tour. I wasn’t really into that, I would have been interested in making a record, however, so I told the guys to go ahead and make the songs, and that I’d focus on continuing work as a TV and film composer, and that I’d meet up with them on the road and it would be great. But when we canceled and Kyle suggested we make a record. That, I could get on board with—and Rob did too. So everybody got on board and once that happened, the record came together really quickly in just a few months.
Q: How does it feel being back together again getting ready to go back on stage for the first time since 2017? What are you looking forward to?
A: The whole process is really great. I really love the part of the process that we’re in now, which is putting the show together, working on lighting and theme and curating the actual show that we want to present, and thinking about what we want people to experience…how that will lead them throughout the night. Also, just getting out there. I’ll look over to my right and see Kyle, Rob, and Brian, and I’ve been playing on a stage with these guys since I was 21 years old. I’m 50 now, but it doesn’t feel any different. They still feel the same to me and it still feels the same when we do this. It’s a time capsule in a way, and I get to be 28-year-old Paul for a couple of hours… then I get off stage and look in the mirror and realize I’m not still that young version of me.
Q: How has your perspective on music changed throughout the years and how has having a family changed the way you create now? What is different about music now versus when you started out?
A: Your priorities definitely change, without a doubt. When you’re in your twenties and it’s all about the band, everything is about the band. That’s not what life is anymore and it hasn’t been for a very long time. We have our kids and our wives, and while we all understand that Matchbox is a very important thing in our lives, it’s not the most important thing. Sometimes it takes a backseat to all of those other personal things, which are the more important things to us. While from a career standpoint maybe that’s not been the wisest decision, we’ve been able to sustain it, so it works for us.
The process of how music is made and experienced has changed so drastically over the last 25 years, for everybody. It used to be you would make a record, do an album cycle, and move to the next record. When that previous record was done, you played some of the songs live and you moved on. Now, it doesn’t work that way anymore. Everything is a living, breathing thing. Everything is out in the world and stays out in the world and is available to everyone who wants to hear it. That kind of changes the way you look at everything. There’s a chance that track 10 on a record can be heard by people who probably never would have heard it because they never would have bought your record in the first place. That can be pretty cool as people making records because a lot of times for us, track 10 is the most interesting track. We as the people who made the music want others to discover that.
That is what’s great about music in general. The way music is made has also changed. It’s so much easier to make a record. I could make a record on my phone if I wanted to. That brings up so many different creative possibilities, and then you have AI coming in, which is going to change everything even more. Will people care about music anymore? Will people care about whether a song is made by AI or not in 10 years? I don’t know… maybe.
Q: What’s your point of view on AI in general?
A: I think what most people probably think… I see the tremendous benefits and I see the tremendous harm it could do. I think it is an incredibly powerful but incredibly dangerous tool that we will hopefully be very smart about how we implement into the world. I think about what it’s going to do with medical care for people who don’t have access to medical care right away, and that can be really massive, but I also think about the scams and how people will use AI for ill will. That’s going to be really bad to a level we’ve never seen.
Looking at it from a music perspective, we’ll have people who can use it as a creative tool to help get ideas across, but when all musical ideas from AI become the norm… that’s going to pose some problems. When kids don’t know any different in 15 years, and don’t care whether the song was made by Drake, for example, or AI, they’re just going to like the song. But what will that do to music? We don’t know, and it’s pretty terrifying.
Q: You do a lot of work scoring films and working for TV. How has that impacted your relationship with music?
A: Oh, pretty massively. Working in TV, the deadlines are so tight and there are many more voices in the conversation. My ability to come up with an idea, have that idea rejected, and instantly have to pivot has increased, where now I can say “Okay, what about this?” Whereas before, if you’re in a band situation where you’re fighting for real estate for your ideas, you hold onto your ideas because you connect your personal worth to this idea. You think the idea is your everything and so you’re going to fight, sometimes harder than you should, because the idea is actually not that good… and to be able to release that… scoring teaches you that immensely.
You have to leave all that at the door because it’s a regular part of the job—where you work really hard on something, someone tells you “no”, and you have to do it again with a totally different approach. That’s a really good skill to have because you learn how to disconnect your ego and self-worth from it. You learn that the idea is not your everything, it’s an idea you had on a Monday. You’ll have another one on Monday night, another one on Tuesday, and maybe you don’t have one on Wednesday, but you’ll have one on Thursday. If you view it like that, it makes a collaborative process a lot easier.
It’s very freeing because you’re going to have bad ideas, that’s just a reality. If you don’t have the perspective to see when you’re fighting for an idea that’s not the best idea, you’re preventing everyone from getting to the better idea. You’re wasting your own time fighting for something that you could have let go to find the next thing…which is actually the better thing. Or, you can realize that your first idea was actually right. It doesn’t limit the process and is a good thing to have, and is such a necessary thing in scoring.
Q: Has that concept of letting go found a place in your personal or daily life?
A: Yes, probably both. It also teaches you about getting older, living, relationships, parenting, getting into an argument with a friend… if you’re learning from those things instead of holding on as you go on, it feeds into everything. It also feeds your creativity—collaboration is a conversation, that’s all it is. If you’re in a room with people and trying to make something together, you’re just trying to have a clear and accurate conversation. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do right now, and that’s really all it is.
