Rob Thomas – Cradlesong

Rob Thomas took four years to follow up his first successful solo album Something To Be, but he’s been far from sitting on his laurels. That album, for one thing, continued to launch singles well into 2007, even beyond the point where his label intended to stop promoting it. Meanwhile he found time to make soundtrack contributions (“Little Wonders”) at the same time as he and Matchbox 20 reunited for Exile on Mainstream. As for the long wait between albums, told Billboard that a big reason his follow-up, Cradlesong, was taking so long to produce was that he wanted to create something which could evoke the power of Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints while maintaining his pop sensibility.

While the overall plan to emulate the album fell through in the final months of production, it’s easy to hear on this album what Thomas originally had in mind. The first single, “Her Diamonds,” which profiles his wife’s battle with an autoimmune disease, features a strong emphasis on rhythm to provide the song’s pop punch, particularly with the song’s ending, which features a full-fledged background choir. And midway through the album, “Fire on the Mountain” takes it to the next level, taking on a Paul Simon meets “Copperhead Road” vibe with the musical backdrop while adding Thomas’s pure pop flair to a wall of epic percussion and dark lyricism.

As it stands, that’s the biggest thing that separates Cradlesong from Something To Be. These songs are ultimately as pop-centered as ever, which is a testament to Thomas’s strong sense of songcraft. But the lyrics are darker than anything heard from him during his career. In that vein, “Her Diamonds” is his darkest single, unleashing some of his best straightforward storytelling: “’Oh what the hell,’ she says, ‘I can’t win for losing.’ And she lays back down. Man, there’s so many times I don’t know what I’m doing, like I don’t know now … I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, but if she feels bad then I do too. So I let her be.”

The chorus is brutal in its honesty: “She says ‘I can’t take no more!’ Her tears like diamonds on the floor, her diamonds bring me down ‘cause I can’t help her now …” It’s particularly wrenching for anyone who has dealt with such a situation, and it’s hard not to appreciate the respect Thomas has for his wife when writing tastefully about such complicated emotions. Taking care of a family member who has a misunderstood disease can be a crushing experience of doubt and insecurity. Thomas executes it perfectly, and the song’s building crescendo of raw percussion and background vocals makes the intensity felt in a way pop radio can respond to even as the song itself transcends the usual dreck bands market these days.

“Mockingbird,” meanwhile, takes a different tack, describing the meltdown of a relationship. “Here we stand somewhere in between this moment and the end,” he sings. “Will we bend or will we open up and take this whole thing in? Maybe you and me got lost somewhere, we can’t move on and we can’t stay here. Maybe we’ve just had enough. Maybe we just ain’t meant for this love …” Thomas has always prized strong lyrics over simple pop ones, and this album rewards listeners who pay attention and pull out the descriptive details, the elements which elevate these songs to a level which deserves to be heard beyond the world of radio-pop overplay.

He also deals nicely with the idea that songwriters by nature give themselves away a little at a time through their lyrics. The album’s title track is among the album’s strongest, merging strings and keyboards in a way Adam Duritz would approve of. He touches on many lyrical subjects: fear of anonymity, of overexposure, of losing what one loves because most things in life tend to be fleeting. It’s a song of holding on for dear life, and the thundering percussion aids in tying it all together, in the end providing an uplifting touch to the end of an album which in general focuses more on fear and loss than most pop music of this generation.

I don’t suspect this album’s going to have as many hits on radio as its predecessor because the music world of 2009 has shifted a great deal from the music world of 2005. That doesn’t, however, take anything away from what is clearly the best pop album of the year thus far by a long shot. Thomas’s sense of songwriting is as impressive here as it’s ever been, and the album as a whole covers a great deal more emotional distance than any other album he’s produced, solo or with Matchbox 20. It’s his most resonant work, music which deserves to be heard by anyone who appreciates music as a craft.

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