Rob Thomas was the singer and principal songwriter for Matchbox Twenty, a Florida-based adult alternative combo that found success with a blend of '70s rock influences, slick hooks, and 1990s post-grunge crunch. The band broke through in 1996 with Push and never looked back, issuing single after single, scoring hits in various radio formats, and watching its debut LP, Yourself or Someone Like You, go platinum 12 times over in the U.S. Thomas himself won numerous songwriting awards as the scribe of such Matchbox hits as "Real World,If You're Gone,Bent, and Mad Season, and parlayed that success into a career as a solo artist.
Rob Thomas was born February 14, 1972, on an Army base in Landstuhl, Germany. His parents divorced, and the ex-Army brat spent most of his childhood in South Carolina and Florida. He dropped out of high school at 17, and bounced around the South singing in pickup rock bands before landing in Orlando in 1993. There he helped form Tabitha's Secret, and the group had some regional success before Thomas, bassist Brian Yale, and drummer Paul Doucette left to form Matchbox Twenty with guitarists Adam Gaynor and Kyle Cook. Their debut, Yourself or Someone Like You, had gone five times platinum by 1998, and it established them as superstars even if Thomas wasn't individually well known.