Yourself or Someone Like You: The Polarising Power of Matchbox Twenty

The old superhero maxim states that with great power comes great responsibility. But it’s an adage that can often be retooled and applied to successful bands: “With great acclaim and sales comes great hatred and derision.” In the case of Matchbox Twenty that was certainly true after the group’s mega-selling debut album, ‘Yourself or Someone Like You’, helped forge their reputation as one of the most adored and loathed American rock outfits of the post-grunge era. With the record currently celebrating its 20th anniversary, a reappraisal is long overdue.

From the Eagles and Toto to Bon Jovi and Matchbox Twenty, bands located at the softer end of the rock ‘n’ roll spectrum have always been cannon fodder for those who only listen to ‘real music’. Any groups who have the audacity to make well produced, melodic and accessible records are routinely, and condescendingly, dismissed as boring, beige, uninventive, corporate and middle of the road.

While those kind of haters will undoubtedly always hate, hate, hate, the reasons for the backlash against Matchbox Twenty are a little more complex and stem from both the band’s unashamedly mainstream sound and the way they exploded into the public eye.

Formed from the ashes of Tabitha’s Secret by singer Rob Thomas, bassist Brian Yale and drummer Paul Doucette, Matchbox 20 – as they were known before their numerical appendage was rebooted as ‘Twenty’ – solidified their line-up in ‘95 with the addition of guitarists Kyle Cook and Adam Gaynor. Producer Matt Serletic took charge of recording sessions and the following year ‘Yourself or Someone Like You’ was released.

Featuring 12 tracks penned by Thomas, with the occasional co-write, the album is a slick concoction of emotionally-charged, relentlessly earnest storytelling delivered over backdrop of radio-friendly-rock, catchy pop hooks and traces of the era’s alternative, post-grunge sound. It produced six singles that, in the three years following its release, dominated radio and TV stations as the band became an inescapable presence. ‘Yourself or Someone Like You’ has gone platinum 12 times over in the States alone.

The phrase ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ clearly explains some of the ill will towards the band. Regardless of whether you like a group, or how talented they may be, such over exposure carpet bombs the senses and magnifies every grating nuance. The songs’ intros became klaxons heralding the arrival of more misery and their melodies burrowed into the brain like soul-sapping sonic parasites.

They were also relatively young as a band and often incorrectly perceived as an overnight success story. Combine that with eventually flogging the same album for nearly four years before 2000’s ‘Mad Season’ arrived and suspicions were rife that they were merely a flash in the pan. They hadn’t paid their dues and didn’t deserve the adulation.

At the time, Matchbox Twenty weren’t the only young band bombarding the airwaves with this brand of music. Equally divisive were the Goo Goo Dolls, Hootie and the Blowfish, Lifehouse and Vertical Horizon, who all boasted a similar crossover aesthetic and siphoned elements from a number of genres to seduce open-minded fans and alienate diehards.

Territorial rockers believe their music is the gospel of rebellion, so they were horrified by such brazenly commercial outfits. Instead of being loud, obnoxious and built on fierce guitar work, their songs were tuneful, tasteful and sophisticated. Or, in the rocker’s eyes, they were watered down, inauthentic and lacking in substance.  

If you casually listen to ‘Yourself or Someone Like You’ it’s hard not to draw the same conclusions. Matchbox Twenty’s mildly distorted guitars won’t offend your neighbours, while the chord progressions are pretty standard and the solos so basic Slash could have played them in utero.

The hooks don’t initially stand out and it’s all wrapped up in polite production. But if you buy into Thomas’s vocals, if the passion that pours from him resonates, everything starts to make sense. The beauty, craftsmanship and honesty of these songs are then revealed as anything but bland.

The haunted Kody finds Thomas writing about the death of a child. He cries out: “If you’ve never heard that silence, it’s a godawful sound.” Long Day, meanwhile, is about being a prisoner of your own self destructive compulsions and rocks much harder than the band’s detractors give them credit for thanks to a raging chorus propelled by sheer frustration. Busted’s fear of intimacy, as expressed through casual sex, plays out over a bleak backdrop of doomsday guitars, tip-toeing piano and a steamroller chorus.

Elsewhere, the picturesque 3AM recalls Thomas's mother suffering from cancer when he was a kid and boasts the classic, disoriented line: “She said 'it’s cold outside' and hands me a raincoat.” Push, meanwhile, is a seemingly pretty, but controversial, minor key ballad that Thomas has said depicts domestic abuse perpetrated by a woman. It showcases the singer’s Tom Petty-like knack for spinning deceptively simple, but superbly catchy, refrains.

The band behind him play without ego and perfectly complement his narratives, sagely stepping back where necessary and whipping up a storm when required. Back 2 Good explores the motivations of cheating couples who yearn for meaningful connections using delicate, empathetic textures that capture loneliness and longing before hitting a crescendo with a repeated hook that moves through dramatic key changes to match the angst-ridden ennui.

Thomas’s evocative, lyrically sharp dissection of relationships, and an impassioned singing style akin to a deep south Eddie Vedder, offer the band’s main riposte to those who see them as lacking a distinct identity. Whether bellowing or crooning, the lines burst out of him as part of a near-poetic stream of consciousness.

This underlying unease was alluded to by Rolling Stone magazine’s Erik Hedegaard in 2009, during a candid interview with the singer that ran under the headline ‘Confessions of an Unapologetic Pop Star’. Drawing connections between Thomas’s highly dysfunctional childhood and the contradictory engines that drive Matchbox Twenty’s music, Hedegaard observes that his writing is “light on the surface, sailing along on snappy, fun-filled melodies; at the same time, it seems to be driven by darker forces percolating underneath: serial killers, doll babies and the like.”

Thomas’s impoverished and harrowing background informed much of his early writing. He was two years old when his parents divorced and he subsequently bounced between living with his alcoholic, sometimes abusive mother and grandmother during his formative years. He began drinking before his teens, stole cars, took drugs, spent two months in county jail and ranged around homeless for a couple of years. In his own words he “was heading down loser row”.  

“I truly believe Rob is one of the most gifted songwriters of our time, but people like to pass over him like he's this really blandified, middle-class guy, and you have these pseudo-punker kids playing as if they're from the street and they're hardcore,” Thomas’s wife, Marisol, said as part of the Rolling Stone profile. “They grew up with money in the suburbs. Well, my husband had the worst fucking upbringing. When people paint him as this guy who is full of shit, it really upsets me.” 

Expressing that suffering over a polished background offered an interesting contrast that reflected the era. In many ways, the ‘90s were when style over substance went into overdrive. Politicians continued down a path towards becoming PR-savvy soundbite machines groomed by shadowy spin doctors. Manufactured groups spread like wildfire and were comprised of puppets told what to say, how to think, look and act as they mimed music that was cynically crafted to sell by the bucketload. And mass media depictions of perfect lives increasingly made anything real, dirty and honest seem shameful.

‘Yourself or Someone Like You’ begins with the major chord spring of Real World, where Cook’s luminous riff, Doucette’s unfussy swing and Yale’s chirpy bass capture that blossoming superficiality. On the surface it’s glossy, comfy and pleasant, but Thomas represents the disenfranchised outsiders struggling to make sense of themselves and their surroundings. Throughout the album his voice cuts through the façade, exposing uncomfortable, but undoubtedly universal, feelings of low self-worth, depression, humiliation and pain.

No amount of praise for ‘Yourself or Someone Like You’ will turn dissenters into fans. Nor will they buy into Thomas as one of the finest songwriters of his generation. But with some miles in the rearview mirror, the aspersions hurled at the band now lack substance and genuine insight. Now, where’ve we heard those kind of accusations before?

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