RAMBLE ON: "Downfall" by Matchbox Twenty

“Matchbox Twenty Finally Finishes Watering Down Long-Awaited New Album,” read an Onion headline in 2004. That got a good laugh. I also used to read the articles posted on the Napster knockoff site Audiogalaxy; one of its writers, Will Sheff (also the leader of indie folk band Okkervil River) absolutely hated Rob Thomas and would dunk on him at every opportunity – “not fit to hold a real musician’s jock,” I remember him saying. Part of it was Rob’s weird, donkey-like vocal phrasing, and his appearance on “Smooth,” a song which only ever gets more ridiculous in hindsight, but mostly it was just the fact that the music was so bland. One of the trucks in my high school’s student parking lot had two bumper stickers on it, one the Matchbox Twenty logo and the other a “Real Men Love Jesus” decal. “Real men don’t listen to Matchbox Twenty,” I’d laugh to myself each and every time I saw it, as if a loser nerd like myself had any right to opine on what music real men liked.

Rob Thomas was aware of his perception, and it burned him deeply. I don’t know if he thought he deserved more cred, but he clearly wanted it; he has more interesting influences than you’d imagine (The Cure, Wilco) but apparently by accident he wound up as the lead singer of the most vanilla band of the ‘90s. He lamented how little press his band got. Their greatest-hits album was titled “Exile in Mainstream,” a nod to the coolness and cred they greatly desired but would never have.

The funny thing is that at the time of that Onion article, their most recent album More Than You Think You Are, by Matchbox Twenty standards, went pretty hard. The article even did a backhanded acknowledgement to it: “That album proved what record executives have known for years: It's actually very difficult to record a rock record that has no rock in it at all.” Indeed, it’s probably the most “rock and roll” album they’d ever done, and certainly the most sonically varied. Even the singles were more interesting – not hugely, but noticeably so. The first single, “Disease,” was co-written with Mick Jagger and rocks harder than they’d ever rocked. (Again, these are very relative comparisons.) The biggest hit off of it, “Unwell,” is led by a thoroughly unexpected banjo. “Bright Lights,” a fairly straightforward track, suddenly kicks into arena-rock power balladry during the bridge.

And then there’s the final charting single, “Downfall,” the most unexpected of them all, and probably the most intense song they’d ever released. Most of that comes from the band, who pulse with a distinctly un-Matchbox Twenty tension throughout. The chorus is punctuated with a wailing guitar line powerful enough that you could almost mistake it for an Oasis lick.

But the most shocking element of “Downfall” comes after the second chorus. A friend of mine was talking about the greatest song bridges of the new millennium, which prompted this long-buried memory suddenly screaming to the fore. I wish I could go back to the first moment I heard it, because I must have been shocked out of my seat: A fucking gospel choir out of nowhere, testifying that only love can save us now. This wouldn’t exactly be shocking for other bands, but it was for Matchbox Twenty, not exactly a band known for escalating intensity, to take what was already their most passionate song and then push it over the top like that. I was stunned.

But in context, the full-throated soul of the choir can only be seen as sarcastic. The lyrics of the song are typical romantic frustration from Rob Thomas – “I wonder how you sleep, I wonder what you think of me.” That’s absolutely fine on its own – the best line is Rob Thomas just bluntly screaming  “I want so much so BAD” like he’s so overwhelmed with his unfulfilled needs he can’t even count them all. But the surprisingly dark title lyric reframes the entire song. “Be my savior,” he pleads at his unnamed target, “and I will be your downfall.”

This changes the song entirely. This takes the focus off of Rob Thomas’s wants and needs, and reframes them into their effect on others. Be my savior, I’ll be your downfall – a blunt admission that if his desires were fulfilled they would not be rewarded. It’s toxic codependence laid bare;“Give all that’s within you,” he begs, even though he knows that all it will do is drain and destroy the person who gives it. He puts too much on this person. He doesn’t know how not to, even with his self-awareness. Matchbox Twenty didn’t really have a signature song but their closest is probably “Push,” and that’s a song whose (unassuming, but undisguised) ugliness strikes me as brave now. “I want to take you for granted” isn’t a sentiment to be proud of, but its bitterness strikes a chord. “Downfall” does the same; when the choir comes in, it’s to up the ante, to lend power to Rob Thomas’s apparently bottomless need, but it can’t erase his awful self-knowledge. Love won’t “save us now”; it may save me, but it’ll be ruinous for you.

If I haven’t been clear about this, I think “Downfall” is their best song, one that on its own should have brought Matchbox Twenty more thoughtful reappraisals than they ever got, but that didn’t happen. That album was the last time they had any real hits, “Downfall” not really being one of them; it only got a few plays on adult alternative radio without crossing over, and the music video was just a live performance (without the gospel choir, which they naturally couldn’t bring with them on tour, thus robbing the song of its best idea).  Rob and company had a couple minor hits afterward, still have never gotten their due, but I wonder if someday he’ll be seen as the Phil Collins of his day, a guy whose outwardly middle-of-the-road aesthetic blinded people to the fact that he’s a very odd duck who wrote a lot of deceptively dark songs. Some critic should stand up for him. Maybe I’ll be his savior.