After 4-year touring hiatus, Matchbox Twenty returns to Tucson

Rob Thomas can’t help but feel a bit jinxed whenever he and Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz get together.

“I don’t know what it is, man, but with me and Adam, we have the weirdest things happen,” the Matchbox Twenty lead singer/songwriter said during a phone call last week. “Like on the last tour” — his solo outing last summer with the Crows — “we had to cancel a show because a giant storm had taken a fan blade at the top of the auditorium and broke it and then flew it up under the rafters and they were afraid it was going to come down and fall on the crowd. So they had to cancel the show.”

He was calling last Tuesday from the San Francisco Bay area, where he and his 22-year-old pop band were getting ready to do a makeup concert at the Shoreline Amphitheatre after they had to pull out of a scheduled July 21 gig. Damage to a road near the venue made it impossible to bring their trucks and equipment to the venue, Thomas said.

“I’ve never had it happen before where a show got cancelled — well, I’ve never had a show get cancelled for a sinkhole, ever — and we just happened to have a day off less than a week later that we could fit it into and make that happen” said Thomas, noting that their tour mates, Counting Crows, couldn’t make the makeup due to a prior commitment. “I think (Durst) and I together just have some weird mojo.”

Matchbox Twenty, which hasn’t toured together since 2013, has been on the road with Counting Crows since the two bands launched their co-headlining “A Brief History of Everything World Tour” in Spokane, Washington, on July 12. The tour runs through Oct. 1.

On off dates, Thomas and his bandmates are sneaking in headlining shows, starting Thursday, Aug. 3, at the AVA at Casino del Sol. Pop singer-songwriter Matt Nathanson opens.

During our phone call with Thomas last week, we asked what we can expect on Thursday and whether the band, which split briefly in spring 2016 before reuniting in March 2017, was planning to record any new material.

It’s like we never left: “Everywhere we go we get to play music. Everywhere you go you’ve got this group of warm people that are welcoming and really nice. I think we have a very biased and skewed version of the world. We think everybody’s really nice and just loves people because we go places and we have an initiated group of people to see us. ‘Wow, people are nice all over.’ And my wife’s like, ‘No they’re not. They’re really not.’”

Cheers to the past: “It’s right at or a little past the 20th anniversary of our first record (1996’s ‘Yourself or Someone Like You”) and right at the 20th anniversary of our first single that really ever hit when ‘Push’ came out. So this is just kind of us wanting to go out and to celebrate the idea that for 20 years, we’ve managed to be able to go out on the road and have people still wanting to come see us play.”

Packing 20 years into two hours: “When you’ve got 20 years of hits there are some things that aren’t going to make it. You want to get all of the singles in, but at the end of the day we’re in the hospitality industry. We have a group of people there who are hardcore, initiated fans and know every deep album cuts. Then we have a lot of fans that were just casual fans that want to hear ‘Push’ and they want to hear ‘Disease’ or ‘If You’re Gone,’ so we want to play those songs. … It’s really a little dance you play around the setlist every night just trying to figure out what you’re going to put in and what you’re going to play tonight. And you just have to know that every night you’re going to have a small group of people that are going to be disappointed. That’s what we do, we disappoint people for a living. That’s our job.”

Learning to be patient: “I think it’s one of those things that kind of got Matchbox Twenty back together, that feeling of everything is not the end of the world. And sometimes it’s OK to just go and have a good time and play some music and not take everything so damn serious all the time.”

Looking toward the future: “Kyle (Cook) is putting out his Rivers and Rust record next year. I’m finishing up the songs for a solo record I want to put out sometime early next year, and Paul (Doucette) has been film scoring and has a few different projects lined up for next year. We’re going to get through that cycle of doing our own thing that we’ve already got in the pipeline so that we can really focus attention (on a new Matchbox Twenty album). At this point, it’s not like we are pressed to have to put something out right away to follow something up. If we’re going to do it we want to make sure it’s the best record we can make and the only way that’s going to happen is if we are 100 percent in.”