Canter Bridge

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It’s not coincidental that Mad Season begins with the hard-driving rock & roll and the suppressed, denied, explosive anger of ‘Angry’.

Not coincidental. Rather an announcement that the fabulous band Matchbox Twenty is back and is still who they were. Only better, if that’s possible.

They’re still remembering:

So scream you, out from behind the bitter ache
Heavy on the memory, you need most

‘Black and White People’ continues this heavily-caffeinated album, with its brass back-up, upbeat tempo, and enigmatic lyrics:

If it’s just that you’re weak
Can we talk about it
It’s gettin’ so damn creepy
Just nursing this ghost of a chance
The fiction, the romance
And the Technicolor dreams
Of black and white people’s

OK, then. I think we need some color commentary.

Or not. Because the anger resumes with highly intelligible clarity on the next track, ‘Crutch’:

Man I feel like hell so come on over
Be a love machine and I could be your friend
Ain’t no shame feel strong for one another
Make a real true color come end to end then
God damn, change of pace
I think there’s still a piece of my heart on your face
It’s a shame to let it waste
How does it taste? How does it taste?

I don’t want to be the crutch
One step from down
I don’t want to be the crutch ‘

One step from down, down, down, down, down

It’s too earlier to tell how this emotionally raw self-disclosure will wear. Will we hum ‘Crutch’ in 2025?

But for now, the golden appeal of Matchbox Twenty derives from the fact that they write this stuff down as the feel it. And then they sing it to really, really good music.

One hopes, for their sake, that they find some mutuality, some enduring reconciliation of love and self-interest, some peace. One hopes for the music that they don’t make this discovery too soon. Not, say, before one more album like this one.

Alas, the boys of Matchbox Twenty are only sure of one thing: that hearts will continue to break. In this, they are the quintessential children of their generation:

It won’t be the first heart that you break
It won’t be the last — beautiful girl
The one that you wrecked wont’ tak you back
If you were the last …

This will all fall down
Like everything in the world
This too must end
And all the words we said
We can’t take back.

But they were only words, or at least words is all that’s left because the stuff of those words has gone. Again. Leaving only loneliness and a sing-able melody line. Good grief, guys, didn’t it ever go right, just once? Didn’t it last?

No? OK, then. Please keep writing, singing, recording. We need to hear more of this.

No relenting. ‘If you’re gone’ continues what looks like a Mad Season theme if not a Matchbox Twenty dominant motif. Only this time, the loss comes with a hint, a whisp, a remote possibility of reconciliation:

If you’re gone, maybe it’s time to go home
There’s an awful lot of breathing room
But I can hardly move
If you’re gone, baby, you need to come home
Cuz there’s a little bit of something me
In everything in you

But not too much hope:

I bet you’re hard to get over
I be the room just won’t shine
I bet my hands I can stay here
I bet you need more than you mind

Good grief, they captured the loss, didn’t they?

The eponymous song of the album is actually quite forgettable. It’s kind of a foil to the hauntingly beautiful ‘Rest Stop’, arguably the song we will be humming in 2025:

Just three miles from the rest stop
And she slams on the brakes
She said I tried to be but I’m not
And could you please collect your things …

She said: while you were sleeping
I was listening to the radio
And wondering what you’re dreaming when
It came to mind that I didn’t care
So I thought – hell, if it’s over …

Jus three miles from the rest stop
And my mouth’s too dry to rage
The light was shining from the radio
I could barely see her face
But she knew all the words that I never said
She knew the crumpled-up promise of this
Broken-down man, and as I opened the door …

This is the selective verbiage of abandonment that isn’t supposed to come to men’s pens until they’ve turned forty-five and suffered enough for poignance.

But it keeps on flowing out of the tracks of this magnificent CD. Hear ‘The Burn’:

I thought about
Leaving but I couldn’t even get outa’ bed …

Thought about
Singin’ but I couldn’t remember all the words ..

So I wonder how I ever got the burn
Everything and everyone I needed before
Tryin’ to get a handle on a reason to shine
Pickin’ up the pieces that are falling behind takes time

There’s a sad, almost dissolute self-absorption in all of this, but one that finds its way quickly outward to the lips and hips of Matchbox Twenty’s fans and followers. Like the biblical psalms (though these work there way more quickly towards hope), the typical ballad in this CD is intensely personal, yet offered up to a wider community to words that they can instantly claim as their own. There is almost not a miss on this entire album, the headline track laid aside for one moment.

‘Bent’ comes closes to describing the trauma of their voices in a way that takes some degree of responsiblity:

Yet even the confession of being ‘bent’ (‘So can you help me, I’m bent // I’m so scared that I’ll never get put back together‘) is a plea for community, for togetherness, as though the solution to bent-ness is not one to be found in solitude or self-reform:

If I fall along the way
Pick me up and dust me off
And if I get too tired to make it
Be my breath so I can walk

If I need some other love
Give me more than I can stand
And when my smile gets old and faded
Wait around, I’ll smile again

There are other deeply soulful tunes. ‘Bed of Lies’. ‘Leave’. ‘Stop’. ‘You Won’t be Mine’. In fact, one rattles on from one emotionally draining track to the next, marveling that MT can keep up the pace.

But they do. These dudes have articulated a life, a throbbing, mobile, abandoned, wishful, painfully memorable pain.

Embedded in this sea of music, listening to it over and over, one hopes for the men of Matchbox Twenty that they truly are ‘marking it down to learning’.