Matchbox Twenty's Paul Doucette on comeback single, "She's So Mean"

“She likes to stay late at the party cause the fun never ends,” Rob Thomas sings in Matchbox Twenty’s new single, “She’s So Mean”.

It’s a far cry from the lyrics that made the group a worldwide success in the late 90s and early noughties. Combined with an uber-poppy melody, the tune has fans divided – but the band is glad to have people talking.

“We’ve had a lot of really, really positive great reactions and a lot of people really seem to like it, and there’s definitely a lot of people who are like ‘what the hell are they doing?’” Doucette says.

“I’ve seen people like, ‘this is not the band that I love’ and ‘wow, this sounds like classic Matchbox’… I think all of that is awesome and par to the course. It’s kind of supposed to be that way.

“We don’t want people, every time we put out a new song, to be like ‘well, they’re doing the same old thing again’, and so it’s been good and we’re doing what we do and people can go for the ride or not go for the ride – it’s totally up to them." 

The single will also no doubt introduce the group to a whole new generation of listeners who may have been too young for their original run of hits, including “Push” and “Unwell”.

Though it’s a definite change, Doucette insists that the “classic Matchbox thing” is still present in the band’s songwriting.

“I think it’s always there because no matter what we do, the underlying thing of what we do is there’s a commitment to melodic hooks that we’ve always had, and there’s a quality that we always try to hit and we’ve always done that since the beginning,” he explains. 

“If we write a song like “She’s So Mean”, when we sit down and write that song, and write that melody, we can tell that it’s a poppy melody. We know that if we don’t take this to that place, we’re really not doing that melody justice. So we’ll go there and we have no problem doing it.”