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

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

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