Rob Thomas Is Anxious About Climate Change. Somebody Help Him! (And Us!)
It’s very possible that Matchbox Twenty’s greatest hits from the 1996 album Yourself or Someone Like You were some of the first songs I heard, having landed on this planet three years previous. Today, the band remains one of my favorite musical acts with Rob Thomas’s deep and scratchy voice imprinted on my brain, embedding tropes of mental illness and toxic love deep into my being. Possibly, this is why I am the way I am.
Three times this summer, I’ve cried at the band’s most popular tracks on two long drives and one dog walk, not because of the mental illness or toxic love inherent therein (“Bent”, “Unwell”, “Push”) but at the power of my own singing voice arching alongside Rob’s masculine rasp.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the lyrics my mouth forms around. And I’ve been moved by something further than my own talent: Rob Thomas’s clear and persistent climate anxiety, coming through his music like a wail for help — one of the earliest warning voices to surface in the late ’90s and early 2000s, before An Inconvenient Truth even.
Rob has spoken openly about his experience with anxiety and panic attacks. At one point, he spoke about suffering from OCD, all of which I recognize in his verses as a fellow sufferer. But I think there’s an extra level of earthly existentialism happening in his songwriting. It’s subtle, yes, but having listened to — and connected with — hours of MB20 lyrics, it’s clear to me that Rob Thomas, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, is also our very own pop culture Cassandra, having sent out the siren decades ago.
To begin with, a current of weather consciousness runs throughout Rob’s work. A Florida boy, he especially focuses on rain and heat. His gravelly affect opens “Real World” with the question: “A-wail I wonder what it’s like to be the / rain / maker”.
Then, it’s 3AM, “it’s cold outside” and she hands him a raincoat. Precipitation comes and goes for Rob’s troubled protagonist, who can only sleep when it’s raining and who he says in interviews is his mom. In the song’s music video, a guy gets out of a Pontiac to ask for cigarettes, though he has a catheter in his chest (an allegory for the ailing Earth, which we continue to hotbox?). Rob gives him three, presumably because sometimes, when the world is ending, a cigarette is needed. We’ll see “burning” become an operative verb later on.
Heat factors into the 1999 international mega-hit “Smooth,” written by Thomas for Santana, in which Rob sings, “Man it’s a hot one/ Like seven inches from the midday sun.” He might as well be describing every day of a climate-affected Texas August in the year 2023. (“Smooth” also references the ocean tide “under the moon”; climate change has been shown to increase tidal flooding.) Make it real, or else forget about it!
The song has further climate implications, too. As The A.V. Club gleefully pointed out in 2021, two days after a “damning” climate report from the U.N. in which it was announced that the planet would inevitably heat 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next 20 years, Santana announced that he and Rob were back together again. However, the resulting song “Move” lacked the languid, sweat-on-your-neck sensuality of “Smooth”; maybe hot ones feel different now.
It’s not just the appearance of weather vocabulary that convinces me of Rob’s persistent climate anxiety. It’s the nature of his use of weather as a metaphor. As any mentally “Unwell” person knows, one way your brain marshals all-out warfare on itself is by pestering you with impossible, out-of-your-hands predicaments. If Rob feels this way about climate change — if his anxious brain whirrs on the problem of a damaged Earth, fundamentally unsolvable on the individual level — it would make sense that he’d dream of controlling the rain and storing it “in boxes, with little yellow tags on every one.” He’s also got a plan to get to “some other planet” should it all go to shit.
But control — or responsibility — is known to come with great power. Rob also wonders what “it’s like to be a superhero,” to save the world, as it were, which also invites anxiety. If Rob is responsible for the weather, or for preventing poor weather events, he can fail. And that’s equally as scary as having things be outside of your control.
“It’s all gonna end and it might as well be my fault,” says the woman in “3AM”— the same one who “can’t help but be scared of it all sometimes,” and “is always worried about things like that.”
Ultimately, Rob wishes “the real world would just stop hassling me.” It’s a sentiment I can relate to every time I read about our impending doom, a sense of listless despair that there’s nothing I can really do, as an individual, to reverse the way things are headed. Rob and I just “wanna take [Mother Earth] for granted,” as previous generations have. (“Yeah, well I will.”)
Finally, in Rob’s oeuvre, the world features prominently as a theme (“Real World”; the refrain “You feel the turning of the world so soft and slow” from “Smooth”) and is always about to end. In “Busted,” he “dreamed that the world was crumbling down/We sat on my back porch and watched it/I dreamed that the buildings all fell down.” But nowhere is this apocalyptic view felt more wholly than the lead single from the band’s 2007 album Exile from Mainstream.
If “Real World” is just a toe-dip into our disappearing rain supply, “How Far We’ve Come” is the full-on plunge. According to song-decoding platform Genius, the track is a contemplation of “an unknown tragedy that leads to the end of the world.” I submit that we know precisely what tragedy that is.
The song opens with “waking up at the end of the world” in an upbeat register followed by, “But it’s feeling just like every other morning before”. For the depressive or the anxiety-haver, their personal world is always in danger of ending. But when Rob intones “Gone, gone, baby it’s all gone,” I’m picturing an empty urbanscape, strewn with ashes, covered by foggy skies —the fallout from human-catalyzed natural disaster. And it keeps coming:
“It was cool, cool, it was just all cool /
Now it’s over for me, and it’s over for you”
and…
“Said where you going man you know the world is headed for hell /
Say your goodbyes if you’ve got someone you can say goodbye to”
Then, crucially:
“I believe the world is burning to the ground”
The latter, I believe, is the thesis statement encompassing his life’s work. The man is crying out, clearly. Won’t somebody listen?
A few radio tunes to listen to at the end of the hottest summer ever:
“Soak Up the Sun” by Sheryl Crow
“While I’m still free
I’m gonna soak up the sun
Before it goes out on me.”
“Santa Monica” by Everclear
“We can live beside the ocean
Leave the fire behind
Swim out past the breakers
Watch the world die”
“Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden
And the sun in my disgrace
Boiling heat
Summer stench
‘Neath the black, the sky looks dead
Based in Austin, Texas, Taylor’s indelible insights are the result of her monthly ketamine injections.
