We had a really successful first record.
It was just thanks to me hearing good songs in the air,
you know what I mean,
and Matt making a really great record.
And we just kind of were the people
that made the record with him, you know?
And then the next record is a little information
can be a dangerous thing,
and we thought we knew everything.
And so we went in,
and you know you're in trouble
when you step in and you say,
I'm gonna make an overproduced record.
See, it's gonna be bad news, you know?
And six months and one 68-piece orchestra later,
you know, we had Mad Season, which really,
I mean, it had Bent, and it had If You're Gone,
and it had You Won't Be Mine,
and it had some of my favorite Matchbox 20 moments.
But sometimes I don't think they came across
quite the way that we expected them to.
I remember one of the best parts about Mad Season
was we got a bad review, we got panned,
but they panned it like they were panning a soul record.
And we were very excited about that.
We were like,
oh,
they thought it was a bad soul record.
That's pretty cool.
But then, you know, after that, all the touring
and becoming an arena band,
more than you think you are,
there was a definite concentrated effort
on 70s classic rock on that record.
Like that to me feels like the first real Matchbox record.
Like we felt like we knew what the hell we were doing,
you know, and we went to the woods.
We went to Woodstock,
and we went, you know,
to Bearsville and stepped in the studio
and into this grand kind of historic room.
And, you know, with Kyle with, you know,
cut off jeans and no shirt on,
and you know,
we'd kind of moved our families up into the woods
and just said, OK, we're going to make a record.
And I think everything about that record kind of
fits that sound and that setting, you know,
about it.
And that's what that record was all about,
I think,
was all was us just kind
of saying,
OK,
we're a really good band,
you know,
Matt's a really good producer.
And it's
about us leaning on each other,
not us leaning on Matt.
You know, like this is about us all
kind of coming into our own.