Check out the article below from Solo now - The Matchbox Engine is churning…..

Kyle Cook and Brian Yale (pookie) Playing Live

Singer Rob Thomas is big on his solo thing these days, but Matchbox Twenty is lingering just around the corner.

“That’s the next project. We’re going to be getting some songs together,” Thomas says about his former band, one of the biggest pop-rock groups of the past decade or so, known for songs such as “Push,” “3 A.M.,” “If You’re Gone” and “Mad Season.”

But for now, it’s all about Thomas, on the road with his second solo effort, “cradlesong.”

“I didn’t have a lot of presumptions when I made it,” Thomas says of pulling together “cradlesong,” his follow-up to 2005’s “Something to Be.” “I just put together the best songs I’d written at the time.”

The main songwriter of Matchbox Twenty wrote 40 tunes for “Cradlesong” and recorded 25 of them. Fourteen of them made the final cut.

“I didn’t want it to sound like records I’ve done in the past,” he says.

When he finished recording “cradlesong,” what he heard, unexpectedly, was an ’80s-sounding record, but not ’80s in the “quirky, Kraftwerk” kind of way, but in a Duran Duran, INXS, Peter Gabriel sort of way.

“On the last record, we programmed things pretty heavily because that was the sound of the moment,” Thomas says. “We knew we didn’t want to do that this time.”

“Cradlesong” will receive a workout when Thomas brings his show to town this weekend.

On Thomas’ first solo tour a few years ago, he performed more Matchbox Twenty songs to help fill out the set list. With two albums of his own, he doesn’t have to do that so much. Plus, he says, possibly as soon as next year he’ll be doing Matchbox Twenty songs full on again, so there was no need to focus on them now.

One song fans might expect to hear here is “Her Diamonds,” the first single from “cradlesong.”

He wrote it about his wife, Marisol, who has an autoimmune disease.

“The song is a glimpse inside of a moment of how we deal with it,” Thomas says. “We’ve all lost someone or know someone going through something. I want people to attach this song to their lives.”

At a recent Los Angeles concert, he threw Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” into the set for the first time; he did it for audience member Courteney Cox, who starred in the Boss’ 1984 music video for the song before she hit it big.

Outside of the basic format, Thomas says, he has no idea how his St. Louis set list will go.

“The singles are always there, the songs they love us to play,” he says. “And we’ll just make up the rest as we go along.”

[src:http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/entertainment/stories.nsf/music/stor/0FB189F7120CAE308625765D00699DE4?OpenDocument]