Top 6 - Matchbox Twenty

What a terrible name for a pop group, but 'what's in a name?' anyway. The Magnetic Fields isn't a very good name either but then you find out it was taken from the title of a French novel that I'm afraid I couldn't find, but another by the same author didn't hold my interest for long enough to finish it. Oh, yes, Andre Breton. Now I remember.

One of those strange little stories happened a few years ago when I was asked, 'Do you still like Matchbox Twenty', as if I'd been found out, but by someone who I'm sure I'd never spoken with about them. Someone had been talking out of school, but I don't mind. I realize that AOR, FM, Mainstream rock isn't cool but I've long maintained that 'cool' is only in the eye of the beholder, that there's no such thing and that, although I'm not supposed to like this sort of thing, I'm afraid I do happen to like what they do.

Rob Thomas once said, I seem to remember, that they wanted to be Fleetwood Mac. I think he meant they wanted to make a lot of great records and sell millions of copies of them but if he meant they all wanted to get off which each other and tear themselves apart, well, it's all good.

They've somehow come back onto my playlist recently and I'm enjoying them just as much as I ever did. It's passionately expressed and takes itself a bit seriously perhaps but it goes well late at night towards the end of some bottles of cheap wine.

So, I had to go back and investigate if they'd had an album out recently and found that Exile on Mainstream is a Greatest Hits package with six new tracks. Well, I'm sorry, I'm a fan but not a completist and I'm not falling for that old trick.

Top 6 would need to include Leave, Last Beautiful Girl, Back 2 Good, Push, Disease and perhaps Hang. So the Greatest Hits selection isn't a bad effort.

Although I didn't ever rate it their best, it's been Last Beautiful Girl, that's been unremovable from my head or from my repertoire of badly-sung office tunes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBIQ_jYxHCU

What's the matter with that.

Don't ever feel you have to apologize for liking what you like. You'll never be one of the cool kids if they see you doing that. And, although there's no need to say so, you know that their record collection is full of stuff that they don't enjoy half as much but are still trying to because they think they should.