Matchbox Twenty's first album since 2012, Where the Light Goes, is out on Friday. And since the band's now more than a decade older than they were for the last album, they were mature enough to check their egos at the door to make the best music possible.
"When you're younger, you can be like, 'This idea is my everything'... And so you're fighting for it," says Paul Doucette. "And [now], I'm personally at a place where I go, 'No, that idea is an idea I had on a Monday. And I'm going to have a different idea on Tuesday.'"
"Bringing that into the band helped me be quicker to [say], 'Oh, that doesn't work for you? What about this?' Until we can get to a place where we had a connection."
The album marks the first time the group worked on the songs individually in their home studios before coming together to record them. Singer Rob Thomas says that yielded a much better result.
"You just burn through money in a studio ... you set this amount of time that you're there, and you're singularly focused every day," Rob says of the old way of doing things. "And I think that you let certain things slide ... you're more prone a year later to listen back and be like, 'You know what? I would have done that differently.'"
But not this time.
"I listen to this record now and I'm just like, 'Yeah.' I like it all the way through," Rob says.
The album's title comes from one of its songs, and Paul says, "Of all the songs on the record, I think ... it's the most genuine Matchbox-sounding song."
So the title, Paul says, "just seemed like, 'Yeah, this is who we are.' ... It's a good description of who Matchbox Twenty is."