Rock band Matchbox Twenty claims red wine fueled their newly released album. Lead singer Rob Thomas revealed that the four man band spent $40,000 on wine alone while recording their new album ”North”.
“At 5, 6 o’clock, we’d break for dinner and things would just go south,” Thomas, 40, said in a recent interview. “And we would think it was awesome, everything we were doing was awesome, and we’d come back in and we would meet some new band out in the middle of Nashville and bring them back to the studio … and play all this crap. I know they walked away going, ‘Dude, the new Matchbox Twenty record is going to suck!’”
None of the of the wine-infused tracks made it on the album however — which may be part of the reason it debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s 200 albums chart last week after selling 95,000 units, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
The rockers recorded the album, their first release since the 2007 compilation album “Exile on Mainstream,” in New York, Los Angeles and “in the woods” of Nashville. They hadn’t lived together since doing so when they recorded their 12-times platinum 1996 debut, “Yourself or Someone Like You.”
But they said reuniting felt “natural” and the musicians began writing material while Thomas toured his second solo album in 2009. Paul Doucette, the band’s drummer, said they recorded more than 60 songs, and selecting the final tracks was tiresome.
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