Rob Thomas trusts his creative muse

One might reasonably think that Rob Thomas has a touch of attention deficit disorder.

He is the lead singer of Matchbox Twenty, a thriving solo artist and a frequent collaborator with other artists. Still, the 43-year-old singer- songwriter maintains distinct focus on all of his varied creative endeavors, and sees each one separately.

“I think it’s easy for me in the sense that I’m always starting off at the writing phase,” he said. “It’s not like I have to put on a different hat or become someone different to do these things.”

Right now, his focus is on his first solo album in more than six years, “The Great Unknown.” The project’s first single, “Trust You,” hit airwaves last month. Earlier this month, Thomas started his “The Great Unknown” solo tour, which stops at Modesto’s Gallo Center for the Arts on July 3.

Thomas called the unshakably uptempo groove of “Trust You” – the song recounts adventures with that friend who always encourages bad decisions – a natural progression from his first solo single, 2005’s “Lonely No More,” off his album “... Something to Be.”

“It’s funny, they sound so different for me and then in some ways they really don’t. I think if you’re listening to Matchbox stuff, it sounds kind of like a whole other world, but if you’re listening to something like ‘Lonely No More’ off the first solo record, this sounds like a logical next step that I would go to,” he said. “You want to be conscious about it, but then at the same time, you don’t want to be so conscious of it that it seems transparent, like, ‘Well, I’m going to do this now. This is my ...’ It still comes down to trying to write and put down 12 of what you think are the best songs that you’ve written since the last record you’ve made and then putting those together.”

“Trust You” was written with prolific Hollywood songwriter Ryan Tedder. Thomas said he learned a lot working with Tedder, whose band OneRepublic once opened for him.

“Ryan has such a crazy work ethic and he’s on so many tracks. ... Him and I are just sitting down and having a conversation with him about the state of the music and about how to do what you want to do and to get that to fly,” he said. “So we started off with this vibe ... and it made us start thinking how everybody has that one friend that calls them up, and when they do, no matter where they are in their life, no matter how stable they are and no matter how good things are going, they’re going to go out and they’re going to make a lot of bad decisions with this friend. You’re going to somehow end up in some dive bar at 7 in the morning with something on your shirt and you don’t know your own name.”

Besides Tedder, Thomas also worked with hip-hop act Wallpaper and producing duo Cirkut and AG on the new album. They add to the rock star’s long list of previous collaborators, which stretches from country icon Willie Nelson to Rolling Stones superstar Mick Jagger and, of course, his Grammy-winning smash hit “Smooth” with Carlos Santana.

“If I’m working with someone, it’s because I want a little piece of who they are and they want a little piece of who I am. You don’t have to change who you are. In fact, I think if you did, it would ruin the whole thing,” he said. “Most of the time, there’s nothing career-ist about it. If you get a chance to work with Mick Jagger or Willie Nelson or Carlos Santana, you just f------ do it because you can. You’re blown away that they asked you.”

While “The Great Unknown” will be Thomas’ third solo album, his band Matchbox Twenty continues to thrive and will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its debut album, “Yourself or Someone Like You,” next year. Thomas assures fans the group is very much “still a band” and plans to tour next year in support of its two-decade milestone. The group’s last album was 2012’s “North.”

While the two career tracks are distinct for him, Thomas said it’s never jarring to step between the worlds. If anything, he said, his band, solo and collaborative ventures have allowed him to keep fresh creatively.

“I’m past the point now where I have to make music to cover my net. If I stop playing music, I would still be OK. Everything I’m doing now is really just because I enjoy it and I can do it the way that I want to do it,” he said. “If I get bored ... if I’m with Matchbox and we’re out there and I’m like, ‘I’m kind of tired of this band situation,’ then I can do solo. Then I can go work with some other people. Then I’m like, ‘God, I miss those Matchbox guys,’ and I can rush back over and we can do that again until we all hate each other two years later and take a break from each other again. If anything, it’s just being able to do that and start early on doing that, it’s made it possible for me to never really get bored.”

Not getting bored also factors into Thomas’ decision for opening acts on his tours. This time around, he selected the Plain White T’s in part because “they just seemed like good guys.” But there was another reason, too.

“You realize that you’re going to be with these guys on the road and you’re going to see them play every night. You don’t want to pick anybody that you don’t like because you’re going to not like them every night. The songs get stuck in your head and it would kill you,” he said. “If I had ‘Hey There Delilah’ stuck in my head every night, I would be OK with that.” (For more on Plain White T’s, see Page D12.)

Thomas has built a career on writing the songs that get stuck in your head. Between Matchbox Twenty, his solo work and collaborations, he has sold more than 80 million albums worldwide. His work spans Matchbox hits including “Push,” “3 a.m., “Bent” and “If You’re Gone” to solo hits “Lonely No More,” “This Is How a Heart Breaks” and “Her Diamonds”

Still, with all those projects to juggle, does the prolific songwriter ever worry about running out of material? Quite the opposite, actually.

“It’s a lot easier to come up with ideas than it is to edit them. You’re constantly writing and the ideas are just inside of you. You’ve always got a melody that wants to come out,” he said. “I think the hardest thing is then censoring yourself and realizing that everything you do isn’t great and just because it’s interesting to you at the time, being able to step back from it and realize what you can make better or what you need to leave alone because it’s good as it is.”

He admits, though, that the creative high of writing a new song does sometimes cause him to get carried away. The newest song is “always your favorite thing,” he said. Through most of his Matchbox career and all of his solo work, Thomas has relied on one secret weapon to keep his attention focused and creativity honed.

“First off, I think my wife is always the first one,” Thomas said of his wife since 1999, Marisol Maldonado. “She’s almost never wrong. She gets it right at the beginning.”

This story was originally published June 24, 2015 at 3:56 PM with the headline "Rob Thomas trusts his creative muse."