The Police's "Every Breath You Take" was an ode to control and paranoia—not exactly the sweet song of devotion we thought it was on first hearing. Same goes for U2's "With or Without You," which served as the theme song to a thousand high school proms before anyone bothered to consider the darker implications of its booming anthemic chorus. So call us gullible when it comes to understanding tuneful songs about troubled relationships, and color us embarrassed for missing the point of "Push," the single that blasted Matchbox 20 onto the charts and into the national consciousness.
On the surface, the song's theme is just plain nasty: "I want to push you around, I will, I will/ I want to push you down, I will, I will/ I want to take you for granted," goes the insidiously catchy chorus. Sounds suspiciously like something that would be in heavy rotation in the disc player of an infamous white Ford Bronco. What's to misunderstand?
Plenty, it turns out. As lead vocalist and songwriter Rob Thomas tells it, the song was indeed written from the perspective of an emotional, if not physical, abuser, though the perpetrator is not him, but rather a composite of women—and one in particular—with whom Thomas had been in bad relationships. "['Push' is] a song about how I was manipulated and how I handled it," he explained upon the release of Yourself or Someone Like You, Matchbox 20's debut album. "How I grew to like it and got comfortable with it. People think it's about physical violence, but it's about emotional violence."
Imagine Thomas's surprise, then, when MTV News reported that a former flame thought the song hit a little too close to home, and threatened to sue for a share of the songwriting royalties. "She was an ingredient in the song—but other people have scarred me," Thomas told Entertainment Weekly. "I mean, I'm not gonna pay my third-grade librarian, who gave me shit about not returning Green Eggs and Ham." In the end, the woman's threat was just one more piece of emotional blackmail—the suit never materialized.
Thomas was born on a military base in Germany, and reared at various places throughout the Southeastern United States. When he was two years old, his parents divorced, and he was sent to live with his grandmother in South Carolina. As if that weren't enough upheaval for the boy, his grandmother further complicated matters by selling marijuana and bootleg liquor. "Every now and then she'd have to run somebody off with a gun," Thomas recounted to Us magazine. "It was a weird way to grow up." By the time he'd entered his teenage years, Thomas's woes had deepened. He reunited with his mother and they moved from South Carolina to a trailer park in Orlando, Florida. Despite the hardships he endured, Thomas insists there was a positive side to his upbringing: "There's something good to be said about being raised entirely by Southern women," he told USA Today.
Well, Southern women and the streets. When life would occasionally unravel at home, Thomas took to sleeping on park benches and on friends' couches. He stayed in high school for a time, but eventually dropped out. "It was just a character-building time," he told USA Today. "And I enjoyed the hell out of it. Girls could come up to me in a Burger King and say, 'Do you want to go to the beach for a week?' and I'd say yeah without even thinking about it. I wasn't sleeping on the street every night thinking about my horrible situation."
One thing that ignited Thomas's passion, though, was music, and he obsessively studied the work of craftsmen such as Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Willie Nelson, Jim Croce, and Paul Simon. He learned to play the piano and often entertained at parties as payment for a night's shelter. He joined a band that played the Florida hotel circuit, covering the work of hit makers like Richard Marx and U2. In 1995, he formed Tabitha's Secret with drummer Paul Doucette and bassist Brian Yale, musicians who would later make up the core of Matchbox 20. It was local producer Matt Serletic (Collective Soul) who introduced Thomas, Doucette, and Yale to guitarists Kyle Cook and Adam Gaynor, and the threesome split off to start a new band. (The two remaining members of Tabitha's Secret have since sued their former bandmates claiming they co-wrote "3 A.M." before Thomas and the others left.) In time, Serletic pitched Matchbox 20 to Atlantic Records, a deal was signed, and he handled production of Yourself or Someone Like You, which was released in October of 1996 through the label's subsidiary imprint Lava.
Aided by the singles "Push" and "3 A.M.," Yourself or Someone Like You eventually achieved multi-platinum status, but it was hardly a slam dunk, especially early on. The day the album came out, the semi-autonomous Lava shut its doors. Shifted quickly to the much larger mother label, the group had to separate itself from the pack where they were not the immediate priority they had been at the much smaller Lava. For nearly nine months, Matchbox 20 floundered in obscurity, but their luck began to change in the summer of 1997 as radio airplay of "Push" and a relentless campaign by powerful independent publicity firm MSO combined to put the band on the map. Even so, the group was declared just one more faceless wonder by the press—thanks in part, no doubt, to its meaningless, randomly chosen name. Matchbox 20, Tonic, Third Eye Blind—sure, you might know the song, but try picking any of the band members out of a lineup.
Still, success is the sweetest kind of revenge, and Matchbox 20 is enjoying plenty of that. And if the group has its way, someday we'll know their faces, too. "You know how we're gonna combat this 'faceless band' theory? By making every single person in the United States love us," Gaynor told Maximum Guitar. "We're gonna make every single person in the country happy, and they're gonna love to see us and love to be with us. And that is how we're gonna combat this thing. We're not gonna kill people, we're not gonna abuse women, we're just gonna be the world's greatest, happiest, nicest, friendliest band, and everybody's gonna understand that."
